Cookie Mueller and Blue on Green

Trying to find comfort

Every few years there’s this thing that happens where an author from the past is “rediscovered” and given this sort of hot new old thing status that I could say is well-deserved, but it’s also bullshit that they didn’t get the same sort of love in their prime. It’s almost always women, which adds an extra layer of shittiness, because, you know…sexism. It isn’t always women, but when you think about Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado or the whole Eve Babitz cult that has sprung up over the last decade or that Lucia Berlin died in 2004 and Pedro Almodóvar is working on adapting work from her collection that was a big hit a decade after her death, I say feel free to draw your own conclusions because I’ve already drawn mine.

Cookie Mueller looks to be the 2022 big thing, and the long amount of time it has taken for her to get the recognition she deserves since her passing in 1989 is probably for similar reasons as the other authors I mentioned, but it’s also for a little more. Mueller was an underground favorite when she was alive and after she died and it takes longer for truly underground artists to get to the surface. Her books came out on smaller presses and her articles came out in indie mags like Bomb or long-dead rags like East Village Eye. If she had a brush with fame, it was for roles in various John Waters films, but she was by no means famous. She was one of those quintessential cult artists, certinally one of the most interesting from the time she came from, at least in terms of ones who haven’t gotten their due over the last few decades of revisiting the late-1970s and early-1980s downtown New York scene. Annie Geng at Gawker wrote a piece about how Mueller is the writer we should all be reading right now, and I couldn’t agree more. I was familiar with some of Mueller’s written stuff, but this new collection available through Semiotext(e) really was exactly what I needed, the way she keeps you guessing whether she’s writing fiction or autobiography, but not caring because it’s all so dreamy and weird that it provides exactly the sort of escape I was looking for. She made everything seem interesting even if it wasn’t, and lord knows we could all use some of that these days. But most of all, reading this reminded me why I am so drawn particularly to artists who did the bulk of their best work around the same time and sometimes in the same places. Mueller isn’t of one single place, she travels all over in the various pieces in the book. But she was in New York during a time I especially love. She was also with hippies out in San Francsico and got her start with John Waters and his whole Baltimore Dreamlanders crew, which is one of the truly great assemblies of weirdo misfits to ever break through in America. People talk about things like a “writer’s writer,” but Mueller was an outsider’s outsider and a weirdo’s weirdo, and she did it all during some really strange and fucked up times. I finished reading her book and found myself oddly hopefully that maybe these strange and fucked up times are producing some people like her and that maybe picking up her book will give them the little kick they need.

I’ve never quite landed on a color or color combination that I stick with. I have lots of different colors to pick from when I go through my closet, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about blue and green which feels so simple and practical, but it’s also been bringing me a lot of joy. I’m not sure why a certain color combination appeals to me, and this isn’t the first time I’ve found myself matching a green rugby and a blue hat or walking around in an old green Hartford Whalers shirt I found and wear around the house because my wife hails from there and I appreciate old medicore hockey teams that no longer exsist* and topping it off with my Russ & Daughters cap. Also, I’m obsessed with this fleece from Drake’s. It’s pricey, but I honestly appreciate a statement fleece. You show up in one of those and the first thing I’ll say is “I hope you aren’t going hiking in that,” but I’ll also compliment you on picking that particular color pattern because I just really enjoy it.

I spent a little time looking into why specific color combos appeal to us at certain times and there are various explanations. Green and blue makes some sense to me given it’s springtime and New York has been grey and rainy for weeks. Blue conjures up thoughts of “a deep, clean lake, a clear sky or a beautiful sapphire gemstone,” and a nice shade of green I could get lost in makes me think of walking around a big backyard on a sunny day or Kermit the Frog, both things are equally cozy. This is something I’ve been dwelling on a lot lately. I love color, but I’m not a painter and I can’t draw, I’ve never had much reason to “understand” color. Still, I’ll read various articles and essays on color and emotion or the symbolism certain colors have in our minds, and I can’t stop thinking about how much so many of us take color for granted as something that just is. Like that fire engine is red or that book cover is yellow and blue. This is all very hippie dippy, I realize. But I also find that the more I let my mind just focus on colors, the better I feel. I’ve been trying to truly appreciate colors more as an exercise and I’ve been noticing when I spend even a few minutes just looking at a particular shade or even a simple brush stroke on some old painting I’ve passed by at the Brooklyn Museum a thousand times, it really does open my mind up and help with whatever I’ve got to do after.

Anyways. Color. What a concept!

*I know they’re the Carolina Hurricanes now, but, let’s be honest, a team moves from New England to…the Carolinas, and they no longer exist as they were. It’s a totally different thing and should be seen as such.