cover image Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller

Ask Dr. Mueller: The Writings of Cookie Mueller

Cookie Mueller. Serpent's Tail, $25 (320pp) ISBN 978-1-85242-331-5

About a third of the pieces in this collection of work by late wild-woman-cum-actress-cum-art-critic-cum-advice-columnist Mueller have not been published before. The rest derive from small-press books and from her columns in Details and the East Village Eye. Mueller was exposed to several zeitgeists, and here she provides interesting glimpses of San Francisco in the '60s, Provincetown in the '70s and New York in the '80s. She has a certain hipness (augmented here by an introduction from John Waters), but following her scatterbrained style is trying, and ultimately she is never quite as funny or original as she thinks she is. In an essay about her appearances in Waters's films, Mueller takes her artistic persona a little too seriously and tells how she picked up acting technique by watching Divine at work. An essay about dropping acid in San Francisco meanders along with cameo appearances by Charles Manson and the Grateful Dead. She is easily impressed by bad behavior, thrilling to a Brooklyn man's confession of murder or excitedly recalling how she smuggled drugs into Germany in 1981 by stashing them in a padded bra. In her health column, which ran in the East Village Eye during the '80s, Mueller doled out advice and information, instructing a reformed drug user to take up painting to make money and revealing that cocaine can be lethal; but learning in the preface that she wrote her own questions is disappointing. Her self-conscious art reviews from Details are amusing in that they rarely mention the work under consideration. Mueller died of AIDS-related complications in 1989. (Mar.)