A new edition of the only story collection compiled by legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller, featuring additional writings.First published in 1991, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black was the only story collection that the legendary writer, actress, ex-biker, and columnist Cookie Mueller compiled in her lifetime. Featuring a new introduction by Olivia Laing and an afterword by the book’s first editor, Chris Kraus, this new edition collects all of Mueller’s fiction, together with her Details magazine columns (1982–1989) and other writings. The additional stories were discovered by Amy Scholder, who edited the anthology Ask Dr. Mueller for High Risk/Serpent’s Tail books in 1996. As Scholder writes in her introduction, the new stories were “written around the same time she wrote the stories in Walking Through Clear Water, but for some reason Cookie decided not to include them. They are darker than most of her other stories; they are the quoti
A privileged look into the life and artistic practice of the experimental filmmaker, music anthologist, and enigmatic polymath Harry Smith.Best known during his lifetime as an experimental filmmaker and Folkways Records music anthologist, Harry Smith (1923–1991) was a spiritual outsider and one of the most original, influential artists of the mid-century American avant-garde. An avid, inspired collector of old blues and hillbilly recordings during his youth, he became a fan of such bebop jazz as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and began making avant-garde film animations featuring patterns painted directly onto the negatives as visual accompaniments to jazz performances. Smith crossed paths with nearly everyone central to the cultural avant-garde; he lived for art and gnosis with little thought for practical consequences. In 1991, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammy Awards in New York. Five years after Smith’s death, the poet Paola Igliori began conducting inti
The conclusion of a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, resistance, and poverty.First published by Semiotexte in 2001, Indivisible concludes a radically philosophical and personal series of Fanny Howe novels animated by questions of race, spirituality, childhood, transience, wonder, resistance, and poverty. Depicting the tempestuous multiracial world of artists and activists who lived in working-class Boston during the 1960s, Indivisible begins when its narrator, Henny, locks her husband in a closet so that she might better discuss things with God. On the verge of a religious conversion, Henny attempts to make peace with the dead by telling their stories.
