‘“Perhaps there is no hope left for the whole of humankind,” wrote Cookie Mueller, “not because of the nature of the epidemic, but the nature of those it strikes.” Cookie learned about AIDS in July 1981, from a New York Times item she’d read aloud to friends on Fire Island; by early 1989, having lost who knows how many friends, she saw her husband, the artist Vittorio Scarpati, hospitalized with two collapsed lungs. “I hope he comes home soon,” she wrote in her art column for Details magazine; he died in September. Nan Goldin, a close friend, photographed Cookie at his funeral and, several weeks later, in her casket.

‘“I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough,” Goldin wrote, in the text accompanying her portfolio of photographs of Cookie from 1976 to 1989. Of course, she lost Cookie, the Cookie she knew and we never will. But Cookie Mueller isn’t lost: she’s there in Goldin’s photographs, the films of John Waters, and in the stories she wrote about her own life, a life I can’t imagine regretting even as it ended too soon.

‘Cookie Mueller was born in March 1949. At 15, she teased her hair until it scraped the ceiling and clomped down the halls of her Baltimore high school in spike heels and cone bras. She dated a boy, she wrote, who was in and out of jail and a girl “born of a lightbulb it seemed,” whose “scalp shone through all the teasing as if her head was a mango.” She arrived in Haight-Ashbury just in time for the Summer of Love, where she encountered Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Anton LaVey, and munched acid until her roommates had her institutionalized. She was transferred to a hospital in Maryland, where she met John Waters at the premiere for his Mondo Trasho. She’d appear in five of his movies, dancing topless to “Jail House Rock” in Multiple Maniacs; brandishing a flogger in Desperate Living; getting screwed with a chicken in Pink Flamingos.

‘From the freak wharfs of Baltimore (where she lived, she wrote, in a crowded three-room basement with a cockroach-eating pet monkey) and Provincetown (where she reportedly wore a monkey-fur coat to pick up the welfare cheque), she travelled around with her young son, Max, landing in Lower Manhattan where she became “sort of the queen of the whole downtown social scene,” in Goldin’s words. She wrote a medical advice column for the East Village Eye—a “‘health in the face of drug use’ column,” as she called it—and the art review for Details; she go-go danced and, according to a commenter on Motherboards NYC, sold MDA, which customers would refer to as “a Master’s Degree in Art.” John Waters remembers her snorting instant coffee “because she ‘didn’t have time’ to make it the normal way”; every morning, she claimed, no matter the hangover, she hoisted her ass out of bed to get Max ready for school.

‘Cookie Mueller had her own normal and her own values—good values, adapted for a life that careened like a unicycle down a fire escape. She was the kind of person who seems to live adjacent to the rest of us, subject to different rules and different laws of cause and effect. Adventures just accrued to her, like money for some and lovers for others (“I’m not wild,” she wrote, “I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path”). And she was lucky, in her way: in Sicily, she rented a car, totalled the roof, then returned it to an inspector too short to notice the damage; in Elkton, Maryland she was kidnapped by gun-wielding hillbillies and escaped by hiding in the woods under the lining of her black velvet jacket. She lived a short life as a born survivor; you picture her losing an arm, then tossing it into the ice box as she fishes out a beer.

‘Mueller recorded her life, in her columns and in short, mostly autobiographical stories collected in the wonderfully titled Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, which is still in print, and the more extensive Ask Dr. Mueller, which is worth the price on AbeBooks. Cookie was a good writer; she had excellent stories to tell, but had she been boring she could have made a career on chops alone. She pictured John Waters as a “tiny baby, fully developed and compact like a pound cake, almost bursting his bunting wrapper with the desire to communicate to anybody who’d listen,” which is a good description for her tales; the New York summer heat is “served as thick as lava gravy” and “closing in like the lid of a waffle iron.” Her characterizations are precise and brimming; her reality was singular, but her heart was everyone’s. She lived in a different world with the same mud puddles.

‘It’s tempting to think of Cookie Mueller as a doer first and a writer second, because it’s comforting, when you write and you’re dull, to think of dullness as the writer’s lot. The wild are not supposed to have insight, which is reserved for those of us too mired in our own heads to participate. The funny are not supposed to be beautiful, the beautiful are not supposed to be smart—either/or’s as bulkheads for our frail senses of self. This is stupid. Some people make beautiful work and some people live rich lives, and some people live rich lives and record them through beautiful work. The same genius that makes a story can make a life, if you apply it that way.

‘From where I sit (and it’s a dull seat, kind of a worn-out rocking chair with a whining squeak), it’s better to record than to be recorded. Moments pass and when you’re gone so is everything you ever lived through; your world ends, even if you are remembered, and what good is it to live forever, estranged? It seems better to leave a semblance of your world than to live as just a character in someone else’s; even better to be a character who can speak for yourself. Cookie Mueller died at 40, in tragic circumstances in a time of cataclysmic tragedy. But she lived an extraordinary life very quickly—she had a skill for living extraordinarily, and an equal skill for self-expression. Cookie was a character, for John Waters, for Nan Goldin, but a character with the genius to leave her world behind. That’s another way she was lucky.’ — Alexandra Molotkow

 

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Further

The Cookie Mueller Fan Club
Cookie Mueller @ Wikipedia
Courage, Bread and Roses: A Tribute to Cookie Mueller
How it Feels to be on Fire Reading Cookie Mueller Today
Cookie Mueller writes British Columbia—1972
Cookie MUELLER By Emily Gould
Doctor Strange Love
The Simplest Thing by Cookie Mueller
My Bio: Notes on an American Childhood, 1949–1959 by Cookie Mueller
The Mystery of Tap Water by Cookie Mueller
Baltimore 1969 by Cookie Mueller
Theatre by Cookie Mueller
A True Story About Two People: Easter 1964 by Cookie Mueller
Narcotics By Cookie Mueller
Jo Applin on Cookie Mueller & Vittorio Scarpati
Cookie Mueller @ MUBI
Tales of a late, great It Girl
invoking your idols: cookie mueller
A Stirring Exploration of Death by John Waters’ Early Muse
THE CURE FOR A BAD PARTY
A counterculture scene queen revisited
Buy ‘Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black’

 

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Extras

Cookie Mueller I GOT A KNIFE

Cookie Mueller Tribute Interview

cookie mueller “secrets of the skinny”

Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

Justin Vivian Bond Reads Cookie Mueller at Low Life @ HOWL 2013

 

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Interview
from Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller

 

Cookie Mueller: “They were just three sluts looking for sex on the highway,” the two abductors and rapists said later when asked to describe us. This wasn’t the way we saw it.

Mink Stole: Yes, it must have been 1969. You know the story. Well, my version’s probably different. In Cookie’s story, she had me wearing a ball gown, which is completely not true. I was wearing brown bell-bottom jeans and a brown leather jacket.

Susan Lowe: I had black nail polish, miniskirt up to here, black lipstick. We were the punks.

Mueller: And I, the blond, was dressed conservatively, in a see-through micro-minidress and black velvet jacket.

It was a sunny day in early June, and Mink, Susan, and I were on our way to Cape Cod from Baltimore to visit John Waters, who had just finished directing us in his film Multiple Maniacs. When we told him we were going to thumb it, he said, incredulously, “You three? You’re crazy! Don’t do it.”

Stole: Then a couple guys picked us up—we were still in Maryland. They promised to take us to New York, and we believed them.

Lowe: We got in this car with these hillbillies because they had beer in the backseat. They looked like… oh, you know, greased-back hair or a flattop, maybe—farmerish.

Mueller: Burgundy Mach IV Mustang with two sickos, gigantic honkies, hopped-up, and horny on a local joyride.

Stole: The three of us got into the back, and the stupid thing is that we put our luggage in the trunk. That was our mistake. And Cookie carried everything in her bag: an iron… I mean she was loaded down.

Mueller: For the twelve-hour trip, we didn’t forget our two quarts of Jack Daniels and a handful of Dexedrine Spansules (they were new on the pharmaceutical market) and twenty black beauties. Aside from these necessities we had a couple of duffel bags of Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul formals and uniwear.

Stole: We started getting a bad feeling about these guys. I don’t know how long we were in the car before we realized that they were never going to take us to New York, that they had no intention of taking us to New York and never had. What they intended to do, I don’t know.

Mueller: There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low-down, that all people are quixotic, and haunted, and burdened, and there’s just no way to lift their load for them. With this in mind I wanted to say something to Mink and Susan about not antagonizing these sad slobs, but right then the driver turned to me. “You ain’t going north, honey. You ain’t going nowhere but where we’re taking you.” These were those certain humans.

Stole: I don’t know if they thought they could just ride us around. I don’t know if they intended to rape us or kill us or what. I really don’t know. Anyway, it was still daylight, and we were in this town called Elkton.

Mueller: Smack in the middle of a famous love zone, Elkton, Maryland, the quickie honeymoon and divorce capital of the eastern seaboard.

Stole: At one point we went through a car wash. We sat in the car through the whole thing. We could have hopped out while the guys got out, but they were fucking with us already, and we started to get scared and they knew we were scared and they were somehow getting off on that.

Lowe: Well, this is how I remember it: I remember seeing the same toll taker, and I’m going, What the fuck? And then we realized the guys were trying to make us lost, and then one time we tried to pass a note to the tollbooth—it was me because the tollbooth was on the driver’s side, and I was behind the driver—and they caught us trying to slip a note. We were laughing because we didn’t realize the danger at the time. We were high on black beauties.

Mueller: “We have knives,” the guy riding shotgun said, and he grinned at us with teeth that had brown moss growing near the gums.

“Big fuckin’ deal,” said Susan. “So do I,” and she whipped out a buck knife that was the size of my miniskirt.

The driver casually leaned over and produced a shotgun, and Susan threw the knife out the window.

Stole: Eventually they drove to some small rural house somewhere in the area of Elkton. There was a woman with a small child doing the laundry.

Lowe: A hillbilly house that I have never seen before, except in pictures of Appalachia, maybe. It was in the woods. Mink and I were on the edges, so we jumped out, but Cookie was in the middle, and they drove off before she could get out.

Mueller: Mink and Susan got out, but Mossy Teeth, El, grabbed my thigh and held me fast. Merle spun the car around and we took off, making corn-dirt dust in all the faces of everyone who was standing there in front of the house…

I began to feel the mood change. As they were talking to each other I noticed that they sounded scared; El even wanted to get out and go home.

After a lot of fighting, Merle finally did let El go… I have always been an astute observer of sexy women and unsexy women, and in all my years I’ve never seen a crazy woman get chased by a man. Look at bag ladies on the street. They rarely get raped, I surmised. And look at burned-out LSD girls. No men bothered with them much. So I decided that I would simply act crazy. I would turn the tables. I would scare him.

I started making the sounds of tape-recorded words running backward at high speed. This shocked him a bit, but he kept driving farther into the woods, as the sun was setting and the trees were closing in.

“What the fuck are you supposed to be doing?” he asked me nervously. “You a maniac or something?”

“I just escaped from a mental hospital,” I told him and continued with the backward-tape sounds, now sounding like alien UFO chatter. I think he was believing me. Anyway, he pulled off into the bushes and unzipped his pants and pulled out his pitifully limp wiener. He tried to get it hard. For a second I saw him debating about whether or not he should force me to give him a blow job.

“Ya devil woman, ya’d bite my dick off, wouldn’t ya?”

He tried to force his semi-hard pee-wee rod into me as he ripped my tights at the crotch. I just continued with the sounds of the backward tape as he fumbled with his loafing meat. This infuriated him. “I’m going to ask Jesus to help me on this one. Come on, sweet Jesus, help me get a hard-on. Come on.” He was very serious.

Stole: Susan and I got the woman to call the sheriff. He came and got us and took us to the station. Susan was drunk and passed out; she had tattoos on her belly, and her shirt would ride up, and, well, they just thought we were trash. We were beatniks, we were hitchhiking, and we deserved whatever we got. There was absolutely no sympathy.

So Susan and I stayed in the sheriff’s office for a while, and during this time there was a jailbreak. I remember there was this one really fat guy walking around in his Bermuda shorts. He had a two-gun holster and was yelling, “Leg irons! Next time we put ’em in leg irons!”

Mueller: Not waiting to see whose side the Lord was on, I pushed his wiener quickly aside and threw open the door and dove out into the darkness. I ran faster than I’d ever run, and I wasn’t a bad runner. As my eyes grew accustomed to the half-moon light, I saw that I was running into very deep woods. Aggressive brambles grabbed at my thighs, poison ivy licked at my ankles, and yearling trees slapped me in the face.

After a long time I decided to stop running, so I got under a bush next to a pile of rocks. I felt a bunch of furry things scuttle away. Rats or possums or raccoons, I guessed.

I lay there for a while trying to see things in the darkness. And then I heard his voice. He was far in the distance yelling, “Girl! Girl! Where the hell are ya?”

Did he think I was really going to answer?

As he got a little closer I saw that he had a flashlight, and I got scared again. If his light found me there would be no hope. My white skin was very bright in the bluish flood of the half-moon. I had a black velvet jacket on with a black lining, so I ripped out the lining in two pieces and wrapped one around my head and the other on my almost bare legs. Those brambles had shredded my stockings. No light would bounce off me now. I was awake for a long time, and then I just fell asleep, sure that he had given up the search.

At sunrise, or thereabout, I woke up. I didn’t even have a hangover. I felt very proud that I had melted so well into the underbrush, just like Bambi. Without too much trouble I found this little dirt road, and I started walking to the right.

All roads lead to Rome, I told myself.

 

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Book

Cookie Mueller Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black
Semiotext(e)

‘The first collected edition of legendary writer, actress, and adventurer Cookie Mueller’s stories, featuring the entire contents of her 1990 book Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, alongside more than two dozen others, some previously unpublished.

‘Legendary as an underground actress, female adventurer, and East Village raconteur, Cookie Mueller’s first calling was to the written word: “I started writing when I was six and have never stopped completely,” she once confessed. Mueller’s 1990 Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, the first volume of the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series, was the largest collection of stories she compiled during her life. But it presented only a slice of Mueller’s prolific work as a writer. This new, landmark volume collects all of Mueller’s stories: from the original contents of Clear Water, to additional stories discovered by Amy Scholder for the posthumous anthology Ask Dr. Mueller, to selections from Mueller’s art and advice columns for Details and the East Village Eye, to still “new” stories collected and published here for the first time. Olivia Laing’s new introduction situates Mueller’s writing within the context of her life—and our times.

‘Thanks to recent documentaries like Mallory Curley’s A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia and Chloé Griffin’s oral biography Edgewise, Mueller’s life and work have been discovered by a new generation of readers. Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories returns essential source material to these readers, the archive of Mueller’s writing itself. Mueller’s many mise en scènes—the Baltimore of John Waters, post-Stonewall Provincetown, avant-garde Italy, 1980s New York, an America enduring Reagan and AIDS—patches together a singular personal history and a primer for others. As Laing writes in her introduction, Collected Stories amounts to “a how-to manual for a life ricocheting joyously off the rails… a live corrective to conformity, conservatism, and cruelty.”‘— Semiotext(e)

Excerpt
from Interview

I have lived in New York City for about nine years now. Since one year here is equivalent to seven anywhere else, that makes 63 years for me. With this kind of time passing, one begins to wax cool. It takes a lot to impress a New Yorker. The word cool was invented here, the etymological roots lie somewhere south of 14th Street or north of 116th. When I first moved here I used to bitch about everything. “There are easier places to live,” I used to tell myself in the mornings as I brought the toothbrush to my teeth and there was a cockroach hugging the brush, licking the toothpaste. Now I find myself admiring these roaches for their bold New York attitude. They’re so smart they’ve been around for 300 million years, seven times that in New York of course. There’s even a modern hybrid, a totally new breed, the albinos. Through evolution they’ve adapted themselves to white porcelain bathroom living. That’s admirable. “God love ’em,” I say and smile. They seem like pets to me now, or like wild elk drinking at the edge of a watering hole. I hated it when the pigeons used to wake me up, screaming and flapping on the window sills amid all their caked-up guano droppings. Now I have discovered that 80 percent of all city pigeons are gay. Male pair bonding seems to make more sense for them here. I read it in some very reputable science journal. Now I respect them for this instinctive genius for population control. I used to hate all the flies here, but I’ve learned that fat people benefit because they get exercise chasing them off their hamburgers. Because of flies too, illiterates find something to do with newspapers and magazines. I used to hate the fact that there weren’t any fish in the fountains and lakes in Central Park, but then I found that they’ve all been fried up and eaten by hungry people and that’s good because it’s really proletarian. I’ve been hungry and I have a fishing rod, so I get this. Squirrels are good eating too, except they’re so cute alive and look like rats when they’re skinned. I used to hate people with money here, but they’re the ones who buy art from poor creative people and anyway on an average day there’s always two or three people jumping out of Park Avenue windows or wielding the Wilkinson Sword blades on their blue-blooded wrists. So I certainly can’t dislike them now. Toward the other extreme I used to look with impatience on the uneducated poor here. But then after I had to go on welfare and after waiting in lines for five days to get 15 dollars’ worth of food stamps that were supposed to last a week for a family of two, I decided that the welfare system was the thing to be impatient with. I know now that ghettos are full of people with rich lives. I know for a fact that the wild people on the street corners who are talking to themselves aren’t crazy and lost, they just don’t get enough carbohydrates to sustain the weight of profound ideas rushing into their cerebral cortices.

Even time is physically different here. It’s faster. All clocks are aggressive and they warn you that every hour is zero hour. I have found that all this is quaint and romantic, it is the stuff of which poignant movies about Manhattan are made. “It’s real life here in New York,” the film directors visiting from L.A. say. “Well … if you can live in New York you can live anywhere,” I answer. There is no other response. They wouldn’t be so glib about New York City if they only knew that just

getting out of bed here is like one of those hurdles on the way to wisdom that all the Buddhists talk about.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

Lately, a couple of my girlfriends have committed suicide. One jumped off a building and the other one took pills. As I remember, in conversations with them not long before they decided to do this, they told me they were depressed because:

they were reaching 40

their careers were at a standstill and

they were lonely.

All valid reasons.

There have been times when I’ve been so depressed about these same things that I couldn’t be emotionally positive enough to get up from bed at 5 in the afternoon to take a piss even when my bladder was bursting.

So I understood.

I have tried to commit suicide but the famous Dorothy Parker quatrain rattles in my head.

Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live.

You might as well. You’re going to die soon enough anyway and I guarantee when it happens you won’t be ready. In retrospect, I know what I should have said to them. I should have told them about my personal cure for deepest depression, which never fails. “Girls,” I would tell them, “Girls, don’t be such pussies! Get the hell out of here! Take a break from the city! New York is only a small part of the world. Being 40 ain’t so bad in the rest of the world. Nobody on the Adriatic in Yugoslavia will see your hairline crows’-feet wrinkles. In Lesbos, Greece or Fez, Morocco, nobody cares about careers and if heterosexual loneliness is the problem, get your butt on an airplane. There are millions of hetero men walking around in all parts of the world that would fall to their knees in front of you and lick your toe jam. And they’re great looking, some of them have money, even. Not all men in the world are assholes or married or attached or anal or too career-oriented or gay or balding like they are in New York.” It wasn’t as if these girls couldn’t get together the plane fare to somewhere. And it wasn’t as if these girls had inextinguishable burning desires for power and New York city fame that they would be throwing away if they left. But it was true that each of them was sad because they didn’t have a partner. “Look,” I should have told them, “if you’re going to kill yourself anyway, why not go to some country where you can hook up with some fisherman on some coast in Turkey or Italy or Spain or Brazil and be anonymous? Why not start a new career as a fishwife? Fishermen always need wives. Or why not go into some European urban area and hook up with a restaurant owner? You could be the lover and bartender. Or go into the rural areas in southern hemispheres and meet a sandal maker. Think of the fine footwear you’d have.” I mean, hon, if you’re going to kill yourself anyway what difference does it make if you don’t get a mention in New York magazine and what difference does it make if a Women’s Wear Daily photographer finds you sheep-herding in Sardinia wearing a peasant blouse? The next time you find yourself climbing out on a ledge, give me a call. I can recommend a travel agent.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Unfortunately, no, I’m still clogged and messed up in my head but hoping today us the turning point. Thank you asking. Well, Robert Pollard releases music virtually non-stop as GbV or himself or under various guises, and I used to keep up when I was in the States and near record stores, but it’s too hard over here, so I have to stick to trying to find mp3s of everything, which doesn’t have the pleasure of having the physical objects at all, so alas. But that’s what I get for revering someone who makes the word prolific seem like its antonym. You and I really need to find that genie in a bottle on the seashore, or, in our cases, on the banks of our respective rivers. Ha ha, I’ve often wished I could pull off a Lou Reed in the 70s deal in interviews, but I’m too nice, damn me. But, if it helps, your Reed-like love’s fans, while fewer in number, would be really hardcore. Love explaining why current day teenagers don’t get pimples as often and as badly as teenagers did when I was one, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Morgan Fisher is still making wonderful things. I’m not sure about Louis Hock. It’s been a while since I’ve seen anything by him. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, J. Thanks, hopefully I’ll be much righter by tomorrow’s confab. I hope the Dodgers to reward your pleasure in their current success stint. Optioned, whoa! Tell more tomorrow. That’s super ace! The movie plans go well, the financing aspect is the worrying part, but we’ll get there. Ride the wolf if your haven’t. Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too! Well, except for the student days part in relationship to the McCarthy. I think that video is still my favorite thing he’s ever made. Concentrate on your mojo, man. It’s your best friend, I swear. ** Tosh Berman, It was obviously my blog’s great honor, sir. Even though it was too racy (?) to be embedded in tact. Strange. ** Misanthrope, I cant think of a single example where the word fusion doesn’t portend meh, except in science of course. I like Chipotle. And it’s a godsend here. It’s no Poquito Mas. It’s not even Baja Fresh. But I’ll wolf it down at a finger snap. Thanks, this cold is being obnoxiously clingy. ** Robert, Hi. Those are two really great Bernhard choices to me. For a long time my favorite was an odd one,’Wittgenstein’s Nephew’, which is kind of a slighter novel, but lately I think my favorite is ‘Concrete’. Sebald is amazing, I think, and highly recommended. Bachmann is really strong too, especially ‘Malina’. I like the early Handke, pretty much everything up through ‘Repetition’, but after that his stuff lost me. I too have a hard time with Jelinek. I remember liking ‘Lust’ when I read it ages ago, but I’m not sure if I still would. Musil’s ‘Man Without Qualities’ is a helluva thing. If you want to slip one country over, I’m a huge fan of Max Frisch’s ‘Man in the Holocene’. Do you like French writers? I’m gigantic on the French avant-garde/experimental writers. They’re my and my work’s meat and potatoes. Happy Friday! ** Okay. Since Cookie Mueller’s wondrous book was recently reprinted and expanded by the mighty Semiotext(e), I thought the time might be right to spotlight it, and … hence … See you tomorrow.

 

 

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Sharon Lockhart Podwórka (2009)
‘Sharon Lockhart’s film, Podwórka, takes as its subject matter the courtyards of Łódź, Poland, and the children that inhabit them. A ubiquitous architectural element of the city, Łódź’ courtyards are the playgrounds of the children that live in the surrounding apartment buildings. Separated from the streets, they provide a sanctuary from the traffic and commotion of the city. Yet far from the overdetermined playgrounds of America, the courtyards are still very much urban environments. In six different courtyards throughout the city of Łódź, we see parking lots, storage units, and metal armatures become jungle gyms, sandboxes, and soccer fields in the children’s world. A series of fleeting interludes within city life, Podwórka is both a study of a specific place and an evocation of the resourcefulness of childhood.’ — Lockhart Studio

Excerpt

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Peter Mays The Star Curtain Tantra (1965-1969)
‘A trance film originally released in 1966 as THE STAR CURTAIN, about the settling and relaxation of the senses after a climax. “Sentences” of cosmic imagry were added in 1969 to form the vision glimpsed in the trance. Dialectic opposition of picture and sound. TANTRA played at the San Francisco Film Festival of 1970.’ — collaged

Part 1

Part 2

 

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Wallace Berman Aleph (1966)
‘Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.’ — The Jewish Museum

 

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John Baldessari I Am Making Art (1971)
‘A good example of Baldessari’s deadpan irreverence is the 1971 black-and-white video entitled I Am Making Art, in which he moves different parts of his body slightly while saying, after each move, ‘I am making art.’ The statement, he says, ‘hovers between assertion and belief.’ On one level, the piece spoofs the work of artists who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an art medium. The endless repetition, awkwardness of the movements made by the artist, and the reiteration of the statement ‘I am making art,’ create a synthesis of gestural and linguistic modes which is both innovative (in the same way that the more serious work of his peers is innovative) and absurdly self-evident.’ — Marcia Tucker

 

______________
Michael Scroggins What Are You Looking At? (1973)
‘What Are You Looking At? was shot on the new ½ inch reel to reel EIAJ Sony Portapak’s that made portable videotape recording open to a wide range of people for the first time in history. Access to this artist friendly means of production allowed for a form of long take experimentation that was not constrained by the economics of shooting 16mm sound film. The video opens with a brief moment with Nam June Paik in the CalArts parking lot, Burbank, 1970, and moves on to the core of the piece which revolves around a casual morning’s recording at the Hillside House in Topanga Canyon, 1973, in which the young child, Tucker, directs the gaze of the videographer –and thus the video viewer. The synchronicity of developing events unfolds in a dance of subjective and objective relationships revolving around the question quoted in the title.’ — MS

 

______________
Lynda Benglis Female Sensibility (1974)
‘Two women, faces framed in tight focus, kiss and caress. Their interaction is silent, muted by Benglis’ superimposition of a noisy, distracting soundtrack of appropriated AM radio: bawdy wisecracks of talk-show hosts and male callers, interacting in the gruff terms of normative masculinity; male country-western singers plying women with complaints about bad love and bad coffee; a man preaching on the creation of Adam and Eve. The tape’s challenge may, in part, direct itself at the viewer. While one might find it easy to dismiss the gender clichés of the soundtrack, it may be harder to resolve the hermetically-sealed indifference and disconcerting ambiguity (lovers? performers?) of the two women. By turns conscious of the camera and seemingly oblivious to it, their dreamy indifference is a rebuke to the disruptive chatter hovering around them, and perhaps also to the expectations of those who watch.’ — Electronic Arts Intermix

Excerpt

 

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Adam Beckett Flesh Flows (1974)
‘A young artist, a career full of promise, a life of innovation and energy tragically cut short. Such a summary barely begins to describe the bright, fast burn that was rising star Adam Beckett (1950-1979), one of the first graduates of the CalArts Experimental Animation program, and a prolific animator, sketch artist, and effects prodigy. Known for his unique abstract film loops, as well as for his precise, yet organic work with the optical printer, Beckett’s work continues to influence young animators both at his alma mater, where he is frequently mentioned, as well as in the wider animation world.’ — Animation World Network

Excerpt

 

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Jack Goldstein Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975)
‘From 1972 to 1978, Goldstein produced a number of short films in which a single action is repeated continuously. For Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Goldstein appropriated the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio’s familiar production logo, which was used to introduce each of their movies. He did not simply re-use the original footage, but rather altered it, stripping away the company name, tinting the background a deep hue of red, and repeating the lion’s thundering roar on a continuous loop, thereby highlighting the artifice involved in commercial filmmaking.’ — MoCA

 

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Gary Beydler Hand Held Day (1975)
‘Over the course of two Kodachrome camera rolls, we simultaneously witness eastward and westward views of the surrounding landscape as the skies, shadows, colors, and light change dramatically. Beydler’s hand, holding the mirror carefully in front of the camera, quivers and vibrates, suggesting the relatively miniscule scale of humanity in the face of a monumental landscape and its dramatic transformations. Yet the use of the mirror also projects an idealized human desire to frame and understand what we see around us, without destroying or changing any of its inherent fascination and beauty.’ — Mark Toscano

 

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Richard Newton A Glancing Blow (1979)
‘An invitation was sent out with date, maps, and times for each location. There was no announcement to the general public. No permissions or special arrangements were requested or granted from city or state authorities. Spectators arrived and gathered at nearby corners. Traffic was moving along at a normal pace. Two cars, a 1963 white Dodge Dart GT, and a 1969 dark blue Dodge Polara station wagon arrived from opposite directions. As the 2 cars approached each other, the drivers moved in close and bumped, banged and scrapped their way along the bodies of the two Dodges. The drivers immediately turned the cars around and repeated the action – 5 sharp glances on the Whittier Blvd. Bridge in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and 6 solid blows where Cañon meets Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills.’ — Ric Martin

Trailer

 

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Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Vault (1984)
‘In Vault, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto rewrite a traditional narrative of desire: boy meets girl, boy loses girl. Employing the hyperbolic, melodramatic syntax of Hollywood movies and commercial TV, they decode the Freudian symbology and manipulative tactics that underlie media representations of romantic love, and expose the power of this media “reality” to construct personal fictions. Using the psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter, they rupture the narrative with psychosexual metaphors and references to pop media and art. Self-conscious strategies such as overtly Freudian symbols, flashback reconstructions of childhood traumas, Wagnerian orchestration and loaded cliches are wielded with deft irony.’ — MoCA

 

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Larry Cuba Calculated Movements (1985)
‘In the pure form of abstraction that Cuba pursues, visual perception is paramount. But because the images are generated via algorithms written in computer language, there is a paradox in trying to use words to describe images for which words do not exist. As Raphael Bassan wrote in a 1981 issue of La Revue du Cinema, “The computer animation establishes a parallel between visual perception and a structure of linguistic or mathematical order: it is concerned with establishing a new organizational field for the aesthetic material. …In the sphere of abstract cinema (lacking a better term), Larry Cuba’s research is, in fact, at the origin of a new direction which does not yet have a name…”‘ — collaged

 

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Chick Strand Fake Food Factory (1986)
‘Added to the National Film Registry’s 2011 list of culturally significant films, Chick Strand’s glorious short film Fake Fruit Factory guides us through the experience of women crafting papier-mâché fruit and vegetables in a small factory in Mexico. Filmed over the course of a year, the film focuses on close-ups of the production as we hear voices of the women making the objects for domestic and international sale. Through their thoughts and feelings, we gain a unique insight into their experiences through extremely candid conversation about sex, food and work. Utilizing the language barrier to speak frankly about their gringo boss and his Mexican wife, in his presence, the workers’ raunchy discussions bring us onto the factory floor and through the production line. A kaleidoscopic blend of music, atmosphere and gossip, Fake Fruit Factory is a beautiful ode to the voice of the worker.’ — Charlotte Cook

Watch it here

Excerpt

 

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Pat O’Neill Messages (2021)
‘Photographer, filmmaker and artist Pat O’Neill tells us about his photographs.’ — Sundance Institute

Messages 1

Messages 2

Messages 3

Messages 4

Messages 5

 

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Paul McCarthy Painter (1995)
‘Painter (1995) is a brilliant interrogation of the senility and late paintings of Willem de Kooning, complete with collectors and dealers puppet-mastering around him. It’s a video deploying, as so many of his videos do, the mise-en-scène of instructional television (from the Galloping Gourmet to Martha Stewart), but one in which the painter mumbles and cries: ‘You can’t do it anymore you can’t do it anymore.’ And later: ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ He means painting, he means art-making, he may mean life. At the end of Painter the artist gets up on a table, pulls down his pants and a collector with a protuberant fake nose sniffs at his bare arse, McCarthy’s own.’ — Dangerous Minds

 

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Frances Stark Nothing is enough (2012)
‘In her video work Nothing is enough (2012), Frances Stark draws from self-reflective Skype conversations with random men met online. She transcribes her libidinous encounters with an Italian architect, and sets them to a score of a slow piano improvisation. Lacking physical imagery, only two voices appear in the piece, depicted by different fonts. The artist and the architect question their own physical and intellectual engagement as well as how the Internet has changed their lives, raising the delicate moral issue of whether their behavior is bad or not. The video’s soundtrack is performed by yet another man she met online—one of the characters in My Best Thing (2011), a video also on view in this exhibition. Stark paid her chat partner-cum-composer for the use of his music, formalizing the collaborative nature of their relationship.’ — ICA

Watch it here

 

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Morgan Fisher () (2003)
‘( ) is a 2003 silent film directed by Morgan Fisher. The film consists entirely of insert shots extracted from feature films, considering the “status of the insert shot in an ingenious way”, according to film expert Susan Oxtoby. Fisher said of his movie, “Inserts are above all instrumental. They have a job to do, and they do it; and they do little, if anything, else. Sometimes inserts are remarkably beautiful, but this beauty is usually hard to see because the only thing that registers is the news, the expository information, that the insert conveys… By chance, I learned that the root of ‘parenthesis’ is a Greek word that means the act of inserting. And so I was given the title of the film.”‘ — collaged

 

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Louis Hock Feral (2004)
‘Louis Hock is an experimental filmmaker and School of the Art Institute graduate whose work has been referred to as a “hypnotic study in motion” (Nora Sayre, The New York Times). “Our eyes are virtually goaded out of our heads” (Richard Eder, The New York Times). A recent work, Feral (2004), asks the viewer to contemplate theatricality of our homeland security experience.’ — First Person Cinema

Excerpt

 

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Allan Sekula Gala (2005)
‘I decided to slow the shutter speed just to see into the dark recesses of the music center on opening night. It was a way of going “behind the scenes” or into the wings. I was thinking of it as a silent movie device, a way of looking at the rehearsal for the opening as a big experiment with images thrown onto a challenging surface, a gigantic outdoor cinema screen. They were projecting videos, of Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting, of Ed Harris painting in Pollock (2000), a veritable feast of creative gestures. The only imaginable way to respond to such spectacle was to regress to “primitive” film modes. But all in all, what I’ve made here is an ethnographic film of sorts, with the symphony audience as disoriented voyagers in a potentially hostile environment waiting for their limousines at the corner of First and Grand, fearful of being swept away by an invisible torrent into the Los Angeles River. It’s a view of the Los Angeles elite rather different from what we see at the Academy Awards, for example. The carnival in Venice must have been like this. While one waited for the gondola, everyone was drunk and wearing a mask but at the same time feeling sort of miserable. The frightened West Sider downtown. I think the discomfort of people waiting for their cars is a sign of how hard it is to re-center this city.’ — Allan Sekula



Excerpt

 

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Fred Worden Possessed (2010)
‘Once, when I was about 18 years old, my friend Eddie Moulton and I were taking a short cut across the local hig- school parking lot and we happened to notice that one of the school buses parked there had an open door and we could see the keys sitting on the driver’s seat. It was a Sunday afternoon and no one was around, so just for the illicit thrill of it we got in and drove the bus from one end of the school parking lot to the other. I think if the cops had caught us driving the bus, the charge would have been something like “joy riding.” A similar impulse explains Possessed. I had a strong, slightly illicit, urge to commandeer the original train sequence from the 1931 film Possessed and make it move in such a way as to give the girl (Joan Crawford) what she thought she wanted: a position on the inside. To do that, I had to create my own (all encompassing) vehicle. By my count, the original sequence provides three orders of motion: the motion (and stillness) of the passengers on the train, the motion of the train itself, and finally the motion of the girl (Joan) outside of the train. By injecting my own additional level of motion, I was able to move Joan from her position on the outside looking in (played melodramatically as desire’s longing for the just-out-of-reach) to a position inside, looking around (played as pure vision). But maybe that’s really just my fanciful imagining and, as such, pretty much situates me in Joan’s original position: projecting desire onto a handy passing vehicle. In the end, at least this much is true: we both love staring into this passing train. In fact, we never seem to tire of it.’ — Fred Worden

 

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Kandis Williams Eurydice, 2018
‘Williams’ ‘Eurydice’ is an immersive two-channel video installation which includes footage of performances by the same name. These performances take the Greek myth of Eurydice as their starting point: Eurydice, daughter of the god Apollo, is sent to the underworld but offered rescue by her lover, Orpheus, under the condition that he not look at her until they have left. Despite his great journey to save Eurydice, Orpheus is unable to resist looking back at her, and she is immediately condemned back to eternity in Hell, lost in the act of being seen. Williams’ project revisits the myth’s dynamics of spectatorship and agency to explore the status of the Black figure as a symbol, co-opted in an immediate cycle of fetishization and erasure. Drawing from psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger’s structure of the “matrixial gaze,” the system of discontinuous influences from which we develop senses of identity, Williams surrounds the viewer with layered and contrasting images, challenging intuitive processes of reconciliation by embracing or rejecting a logic of coherence. Within these schema of representation and rupture, the viewer is left to their own devices, asked at once to draw from and discard the frameworks by which we make meaning of what we see.’ — curate.la

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Warning: my head is still clogged, and my brain is only semi-usable. ** Tomk, Hi, Tom. Thanks. Fleeting doesn’t seem to be doable but short-lived is still the hope. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! Oh, that was you asking that question? I thought, is that Conrad?, but I didn’t have my glasses on, so I wasn’t sure. Thank you for being there. I have to do an event for the ‘Jerk’ DVD at Potemkine on Friday night, otherwise the Grandrieux screening would be very tempting. The Roni Horn was nice, not amazing. I think I’ve seen Gonzales-Torres’s lightbulb string pieces so many times that they don’t have anything left for me. The DG-T hologram piece is quite eerie and very nice. I haven’t been around the galleries of late due to busyness and now sickness so I’m behind. I want to see the Sturtevant show at Ropac. And I guess the probably shitty show at Palais de Tokyo. You seen anything you recommend? Nice to see you, bud. ** David Ehrenstein, Happy you liked it. ** Jack Skelley, Hi, Jack! Shit, I owe you an email. Sorry, I’ll get on that. I’ve just been overly swamped lately. Book updates! I look forward to them, natch. And to seeing you on Saturday. xo. ** Dominik, Hi, D!!!! I don’t think I’ve ever wanted every copy of anything either. I do want to have everything Robert Pollard puts out, but that has become basically an impossibility at this point. Your love of yesterday would be so nice. Maybe my seriously impaired brain can come up with some interestingly dumb or weird film scenarios. Maybe I’ll try. Love making cigarette smoke a miraculous decongestant, G. ** Tosh Berman, Hi. Right. I actually did a post about his project here at some point, although I’m not sure I’ve restored it yet. I remember what a total wow that blank album cover was when it first came out. The first blank rock album cover that wasn’t a bootleg. Thanks, Tosh. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi! I planned to tell you I was going to do that when you were here, but I spaced and forgot to mention it. It was so good to see you, sir, and I’m happy to hear your trip revived you! Love, me. ** _Black_Acrylic, It does not seem at all impossible that Oscar will have some kind of show in your vicinity, and I will hope so. He’s amazing. ** Misanthrope, If you do want to make it a gif, you can use the site ezGif. I’ve never made a gif from a photo there — only from video –but I know it’s possible. I have a serious dislike of Mexican fusion, or at least I’ve never eaten any that wasn’t just an unnecessarily self-consciously clever abomination. If it ain’t broke, … etc. I’m not a fan of chains, but I’m very grateful that Paris has a Chipotle. Thanks for the well wishes. Yeah, I need to get this stupid cold behind me immediately. ** Steve Erickson, I’m feeling slightly worse, but thank you. I’m grateful for the ‘slightly’. I am definitely not immune to extremely horrible US news of which you speak. Oh, sure, about Vox Populi. I’ve liked them, but I haven’t dipped in for a while. I should. I think some extremely watered down and re-populated version of then still plays here sometimes. ** Robert, Hi, Robert! Thank you! Awesome stuff you’re reading. Yeah, Thomas Bernhard, incredible, right? Do you have a fave? Are you in a situation where you can concentrate on greatness input and output of whatever sort for a while? Happy to see you again. ** Right. I made you a gig of films and videos instead of music this time, all generated by that city-shaped fount of the weird and new aka Los Angeles. Some really good stuff in there if you have the time and inclination. See you, hopefully less foggily on my end, tomorrow.