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BBOOKS VERLAG
Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller
By Chloé Griffin. Contributions by John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, et al.
The story of cult figure Cookie Mueller's life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with those who knew her, with photographs by David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others
Cookie Mueller (1949-1989) was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious stories and a maven of New York's downtown art world. Edgewise, by Berlin-based actress and writer Chloé Griffin, tells the story of Cookie's life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with the people who knew her, including John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, Sharon Niesp, Max Mueller, Linda Yablonsky, Richard Hell, Amos Poe and Raymond Foye. The contributors take us from the late-1960s artist communes of Baltimore to 1970s Provincetown and New York, through 1980s Berlin and Positano. Along with the text, Edgewise includes artwork, unpublished photographs and archival material and photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others.
Featured photograph, by Audrey Stanzler, is reproduced from Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Bookslut
Corinna Pichl
Instead of an ordinary biography, Berlin-based artist Chloé Griffin's Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller is an oral history of the people who knew underground writer and actress Cookie Mueller, best known as a character in John Waters's movies Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs: her friends, members of her family, and her colleagues, who shared their stories of the time they spent with the artist. For several years, Griffin traveled around recording conversations and taking photos that she distilled into a book spanning all periods of Cookie's life.
BOMB Magazine
Pati Hertling
In the pages of EDGEWISE, a labour of love of some eighty years, Griffin collected the memories of the people who knew Cookie best, compiling a sensitive and thrilling oral history that captures her life from her childhood in suburban Maryland, through the wild times with John Walters, Divine, Sue Lowe, Mink Stole, the others in Baltimore, to the times in Provincetown, where she lived with her son, Maz, and her lover of many years, Sharon Niesp.
Frontier LA
Lydia Siriprakorn
Mueller’s tale was too rich to capture in a traditional, linear biography, and knowing that wouldn’t do a free spirit like her justice, author Chloé Griffin took a different approach in her new book, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller. Griffin labored for years, traveling and conducting extensive interviews with Mueller’s friends, family and former colleagues for their intimate accounts. The book includes interviews with John Waters, Mink Stole, and Mueller’s only child, Max. Through oral history and photographs, Griffin weaves together a more complete look at the elusive legend’s life, and it’s as heartfelt and sincere as it is badass.
Interview
Emily Gould
To the people who knew her personally, whose voices tell her story in artist Chloe Griffin kaleidoscopio new oral-history tome, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller (B_Books), she played even more myriad and fascinating roles. For the first time, through Griffin's book, we see Cookie as her friends and lovers saw her: as inspiration, protector, dancer, instigator, drug dealer, wild card, criminal, life of the party, goddess, mental patient, hostess, confidante, artist, mother, savior.
Griffin tells Cookie's story by deftly weaving together interviews and insterspersing them with excerpts from Cookie's books and diaries so that her own voice gets into the mix. Though the chorus of remembrances can contradict each other or become repetitive, that's part of the point; there's no one truth to Cookie's life.
The Brooklyn Rail
Earnest Jarrett
Griffin flows together the voices of almost 90 people—including John Waters, Mink Stole, Lynne Tillman, and Max Mueller—into a book-length river of recollection aimed at capturing Cookie, who died in 1989, a major force in the downtown art scene; a phenomenon, as Gary Indiana puts it in Edgewise, “like a woman in flames […] something like I’d never seen before in my life.”
Style.com
Honey Dijon
Mueller died of AIDS-related causes on November 10, 1989, and Chloé Griffin has written a book titled Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, which pays homage to her life and is told through the voices of her friends, lovers, and family. One of the best reads of 2014.
Electronic Beats Magazine
Richard Hell
But the book is a kind of masterpiece. Chloé nailed it; her commitment and devoted effort, not to mention her style, in creating this book, do Cookie justice, which is saying a lot. Cookie was unique and so, similarly, is this great book.
New York Review of Books
Negar Azimi
Serves as a sort of annotated guide to her work—stories about her stories, sometimes conflicting, often more outlandish than what she committed to print.
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Featured images and excerpt below are reproduced from Chloé Griffin's love letter to underground Baltimore/Provincetown/New York figure Cookie Mueller, "quite possibly the best history of New York's much reprised 'last avant-garde' of the 1980s" according to Chris Kraus. "Edgewise reinvents the inspired amateurism of Mueller's work, and also creates unforgettable portraits of John Waters' Baltimore and Provincetown in the 1970s, 'when the water was still clean." continue to blog
"Why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path." So begins Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Chloé Griffin's must-read, low-fi homage to the extraordinarily well loved cult writer, actress and muse to many, who died in 1989 of AIDS-related causes at the age of 40. "Cookie looked like Janis Joplin meets Jayne Mansfield, a redneck hippie with a little bit of glamour drag thrown in. She never led a safe life, unsafe was her middle name. She lived on the edge, always," John Waters is quoted. "She was like a woman in flames—she was something like I'd never seen before in my life," Gary Indiana tells Griffin. "Not just a beauty, but the freedom that she had about herself, that extraordinary freedom… She was like a comet going across the sky once in 100 years." Featured image is "Cookie Mueller, N.Y.C, 1979" by Don Herro. To see more from the book, continue to our blog. continue to blog
"This is a rare period in human history. Never before have so many with so little become so big for a duration of time so short. Never before has such a shiftless bunch of life's lightweights hewn such formidable nests for themselves in so many other people's minds. Never before have the woody, meandering paths of directionless plodders led to the blazing floodlit clearing in the forest, the center ring for the mini-history makers. This is the age of fleeting media stars. Watch the news. Read the papers. These stars are easy to forget." So wrote Cookie Mueller, timeless cult actress, writer and muse to virtually every underground scene of the 1970s and 80s, in a 1987 column for Details magazine. This gem is one of many hundreds excerpted in Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Berlin-based Chloé Griffin's breakout homage/oral-history dedicated to Mueller and her generation of off-the-hook risk-takers and scandal-makers. Griffin officially launches the book in New York this week with events Wednesday through Sunday at Participant gallery and Printed Matter, where she will be joined on all occasions by special guests who knew or were influenced by Cookie during her short, meteoric lifetime (1949-1989). To see more from the book, continue to our blog. "Cookie," ca. 1981, by Ileane Meltzner, is reproduced from Edgewise. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 6 x 9 in. / 336 pgs / 230 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $29.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $41.95 GBP £22.00 ISBN: 9783942214209 PUBLISHER: Bbooks Verlag AVAILABLE: 9/30/2014 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA UK ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Bbooks Verlag. By Chloé Griffin. Contributions by John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, et al.
The story of cult figure Cookie Mueller's life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with those who knew her, with photographs by David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others
Cookie Mueller (1949-1989) was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name first as an actress in the films of John Waters, and then as an art critic and columnist, a writer of hilarious stories and a maven of New York's downtown art world. Edgewise, by Berlin-based actress and writer Chloé Griffin, tells the story of Cookie's life through an oral history composed of more than 80 interviews with the people who knew her, including John Waters, Mink Stole, Gary Indiana, Sharon Niesp, Max Mueller, Linda Yablonsky, Richard Hell, Amos Poe and Raymond Foye. The contributors take us from the late-1960s artist communes of Baltimore to 1970s Provincetown and New York, through 1980s Berlin and Positano. Along with the text, Edgewise includes artwork, unpublished photographs and archival material and photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, David Armstrong, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Hujar and others.
