DUSTY A Review: SLOW FADING - Outtake

DUSTY - SLOW FADING - HERE

A long outtake from Dusty's POV

YellowGlue is writing a very fine explanation of Dusty's cocaine addiction that while it may not be universal, certainly explains the addiction of so many young people.

THE TERRIBLE CONFRONTATION WITH DEATH

WITH THE VOID

WITH REALITY WITHOUT THE VEIL OF ILLUSION

A REALITY DUSTY SEES. A HYPER-REALITY DUSTY SEES THAT IS UNBEARABLE

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For Dusty is seeing the SCREEN

BAUDRILLARD

DUSTY HAS STOPPED FALLING AND HIT BOTTOM

And then, right there in front of everyone, it finally happens.

I'm not falling anymore.

I fall all the way down.

And the bottom?

The bottom is just dark.

Just alone, with chains and weights and locks you had every chance to shrug off and never did.

The bottom is keeping up appearances through a group picture with eight people who have no idea you just died so that the mother of your murderer can have a pretty picture to hang in her living room.

The bottom is feeling the person you thought for so long was love and home and heart and soul to you, looking right at you without any hint of an idea what she's just done.

The bottom is knowing she doesn't see you.

And if it's better this way, it doesn't even matter, because she never did.

If she had, I'd be walking to the Continental next to her instead of Petey.

I'd have her hand in mine instead of my phone.

I'd be kissing the pulse point I squeezed too tightly, instead of deleting her number and dialing his.

Edward has seen through the SPECTACLE of  graduation porno disguising the emptiness of the ritual. And he sees the horror of the ritual to be continued with marriage, children, your own children graduating, finding something you tell yourself you want to do, and all the while just  waiting for death. It is the awareness of DEATH in life that Malabou writes about. Is this what Jesus meant when he said, "Let the dead bury the dead?" Edward knows he is dead on his side of the window/screen, but so are they, only they are not aware that they are dead. So they do not require drugs giving the deadening of awareness. 

This is the theme of:

DUSTY Chapter 35

I try to remember the last time I looked at my girl through unaddicted eyes.

It's been years. I've been lit, guilty, spun, drunk-wasted the entire time. Every day. Through each I love you, through 

each touch, through each don't ever leave me. All the affection I have ever showed this girl has been habit-stained. 

It's never just been me. Ever. Cocaine has always been there. And before coke, it was bud or E, or shots of Jameson 

on my bedroom floor.

I've been dragging her though my bullshit for years, doing what I need to do to keep her, saying what I need to say to 

make sure she's always around. I dump all of my misuses on Bella because she's the only one who can carry them and still love me the same.

After everything I've done, she forever loves me back.

I take another drag from my smoke and pull at the front of my hair.

Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.

I love her too hard.

I love her unsafe.

I love her to the brink.

Dope sick and tipped, I'm looking at her, and she's so small. She's a seventeen-year-old girl, cluttered with scars, manipulated into loving me. My stigma is all over her. I'm all over her. She never even had a chance against a monster like me.

I influenced her.

I sought and took.

I tricked her into loving me, because I did love her first.

I took advantage.

I've hurt her.

I just made her bleed.

That's not the first time. Cocaine smiles.

I've been with other girls, and I've chosen drugs—

I can make this go away, Dusty.

"Bliss,"I whisper with a throat lodged full of regret. I shake my head in an attempt to clear too many thoughts. I can think straight. I haven't had to think with a straight mind in so long.

"Hey," she says soothingly, brushing my too long hair away from my eyes. Baby smiles and my insides constrict. "Tell me," she says.

I clear my throat. "Princess," I say, brimming with anxiety and regret and self-disgust and how could she let me do this to her?

"Fuck," I moan into B's stomach.

Baby rubs my back and speaks quietly. "Tell me, Edward. Tell me..."

She turns my head with her hands on the side of my face, forcing me to be still, giving me no other choice but to look at her.

"I'm clean. I'm clean," I cry.

Looking at her is too hard. It's all there, on every part of her—our whole relationship. It's in the guilt behind her eyes, and in the purple below them. It's explained in her bitten-too-low fingernails, and in the dark bruises I kissed on her neck. It's in her cut lip and tangled hair. It's her sleeping in the back of this car when she should be at home in her bed. It's how she knows how to talk to me, a drug addict on a week long comedown. It's in the way she touches me, just right. It's in the life she's thrown away for this. It's in her uncertain future. It's in her broken friendship with Alice. It's in every lie she keeps.

It's in her beating-for-me heart.

It's in me, able to ignore all of it because I've been too fucked up to care.

And now I'm clean.

But I don't know how I can stay this way.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

For Edward to tolerate then access his power to be, to be an ubermensch (Nietzsche) this is his task in becoming "clean."

To quote Foucault on curiosity: it evokes "a concern", it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; an acute sense of real which, however, never becomes fixed; a readiness to find our surroundings strange and singular; a certain restlessness in ridding ourselves of our familiarities and looking at things otherwise; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is passing away; a lack of respect for traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.

Eric Packer cannot reinvent himself either; find the "restless identities stirring":

Maybe he didn't want that life after all, starting over broke, hailing a cab in a busy intersection filled with jockeying junior executives, arms aloft, bodies smartly spinning to cover every compass point. What did he want that was not posthumous? He stared into space. He understood what was missing, the predatory impulse, the sense of large excitation that drove him through his days, the sheer and reeling need to be. (C. 209)

Dusty has decided to leave Bliss knowing she will suffer and knowing what she will realize from it. To become herself. To free her of himself. As Badiou says:

At the heart of love à la française lies the idea of 

freedom. To love truly is to want the other free, and this 

includes the freedom to walk away. Love is not about 

possession or property. Love is no prison where two 

people are each other’s slaves. Love is not a commodity, 

either. Love is not capitalist, it is revolutionary. If 

anything, true love shows you the way to selflessness.

In his recent book, “In Praise of Love,” the French 

philosopher Alain Badiou 

reminds us that love implies 

constant risk. There is no safe, 

everlasting love. The idea 

that you can lock two people’s 

love once and for all, and toss 

the key, is a puerile fantasy. 

For Mr. Badiou, love is 

inherently hazardous, always 

on the brink of failure and 

above all vulnerable. Embrace its fragility, wish your 

beloved 

to be free and you might just, only just, have a chance to 

retain his or her undying gratitude, and love

Now Dusty is out as a book - Innocents

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19214578-innocents

LA PREMIERE for Breaking Dawn 2:Kristen Stewart and Ayn Rand's Dominique Francon: CONTEMPT For SUMMIT'S "Empty" Celebration

LA Premiere of Breaking Dawn 2
This is not a dress - link

Does Stewart appear in DEMURE as a PR person might advise her to do?
No, she appears in OBSCENE.
The "dress" is porn that is hyper-porn that is OBSCENE costing thousands of dollars by a famous designer, so how can she be criticized. It is sexier than sexy, hyper-sexy, porno, hyper-porno = OBSCENE (Baudrillard, Herzog). 
See it and look at it. Your eyes lock on her sex and you wonder if she waxes it. It is skin you see through the translucent chiffon. It is being given to the photographers and any paparazzi who are at the Premiere. Gratis, far "worse" (Nietzsche) than the photoshopped images of the media manufactured Debordian SPECTACLE of a scandal.

This "gown" designed by a designer of glamorous gowns for glamorous women, Zuhair Murad  link for Kristen Stewart to wear to Summit Entertainment's Premiere of Breaking Dawn 2 in Los Angeles, the virgin first showing of the long awaited final film. It is also the first time Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson have appeared in public since the media SPECTACLE of the scandal. 

Worse than any paparazzi image ever stolen from her and she is giving it to them. Here is my ass, take all the images you want.
But you know they would rather "steal"  an image than have it be given to them.
It is a simulacrum being worn at an event that is in itself  an event of Simulated Reality, a copy of a copy with no original.
this is not an opening, not a premiere of celebration, it is a  coarse circus to pump up the box office. To crudely bring in as much money as possible on opening weekend. To exploit the sexual relationship of the two stars.

You want sex she says with this "dress." Well I'll give you sex, dirty sex.

She is wearing it as an act of CONTEMPT. The dress was designed as a floating sign of CONTEMPT, masking and asserting the integrity and purity of the young woman wearing it. Designed for crude, coarse, lewd, lustful, boorish, greedy, impotent LA Hollywood types, Summit Entertainment, who would exploit a loving relationship between two people, film them in soft-porn sex scenes, promote  a sexual relationship in real life by sending paparazzi after  them constantly to harass them, and then to photoshop "scandal" images, to make hundreds of millions of dollars, and save on promotional costs.

Here is the media manufactured Debordian SPECTACLE of a Scandal

And  here is "NORMAL", ACCEPTED,

APPLAUDED!A Parody, a "dress" as Swiftian Satire.

Foucault touches here on the very structure we find in

     Swift, whereby the function of satire is not simply to

     create a strange and unfamiliar world, but rather to

     return, to rebound upon the present, such that the real

     world is shown to be itself a parody...

For there is

     a point at which the relation between the distorted image

     and the real thing becomes unstable, beyond all dialectical

     mediation, a point at which, moreover, it loses the

     *generative* force that is given in the concept of

     productive negation.  The fact that the inverted image

     turns out not to be an inversion, but to reveal that the

     normal world is itself already inverted, calls into

     question the very standard of "normality" by which one

might measure invertedness

          ^11^ Slavoj Zizek,_ For They Know Not What They Do: 

     Enjoyment as a Political Factor_ (New York: Verso, 1992), 13.

____________________________________________________

Ayn Rand's Dominique Francon is fictionalized in a similar performance, thus calling to mind that "life imitates art".

So I turn to Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead: Dominique Francon's wedding to Gail Wynand. Dominique observes the world as evil. Integrity, excellence all that we say we admire and revere is sabotaged, punished, ridiculed, undermined, and dragged through the dirt. 

A beautiful and desirable woman  she determines to choose the "worst" man she can to marry:

Gail Wynand, the owner of The Banner that has raised mediocrity to admiration to make a fortune in wealth and power.

Returning from Reno, after divorcing  Peter Keating, Wynand meets her train:

"Where are we going, Gail?"

"To get the license. Then to the judge's office. To be married."

"No," she said.

"I want a real wedding, Gail. I want it at the most ostentatious hotel in town. I want engraved invitations, guests, mobs of guests, celebrities, flowers, flash bulbs and newsreel cameras. I want the kind of wedding the public expects of Gail Wynand."

She saw him again when she stood beside him, facing a judge who pronounced the words of the marriage ceremony over the silence of six hundred people in the floodlighted ballroom of the Noyes-Belmont Hotel.

The background she had wished was set so perfectly that it became its own caricature, not a specific society wedding, but an impersonal prototype of lavish, exquisite vulgarity.

Then she stood with him, the mob becoming a heavy silence and a gluttonous stare behind him, and they faced the judge together. She wore a long, black dress with a bouquet of fresh jasmine, his present, attached by a black band to her wrist. Her face in the halo of a black lace hat was raised to the judge.......

Afterward the mockery of the monster reception that followed left him immune. He posed with her for the battery of press cameras and he complied gracefully with all the demands of the reporters, a special noisier mob within the mob. He stood with her in the receiving line, shaking an assembly belt of hands that unrolled past them for hours. ....untouched by these guests who had come here driven by boredom, by an envious hatred, a reluctant submission to an invitation bearing his dangerous name, a scandal-hungry curiosity. He looked as if he did not know that they took his public immolation as their rightful due, that they considered their presence as the indispensable seal of sacrament upon the occasion, that of all the hundreds he and his bride  were the only  ones to whom the performance was hideous. (F. 478-480)

Paul Pflug is a big press/PR honcho at Summit. He also co-owns a PR company called Principal Communications Group, which is “a strategic corporate communications firm serving the media and entertainment industries”.Dan Abrams co-founded Gossip Cop. He also owns a business called Abrams Research which , in its own words, “is a full service digital and social media agency, specializing in the development of web-based digital marketing and social media campaigns.” In 2009, Principal Communications and Abrams Research “formed an alliance combining the benefits of both organizations’ unique capabilities.” (http://www.deadline.com/2009/0... big honcho of press at Summit and the owner of Gossip Cop are, or at least in 2009 were, in business together.Wonder why Gossip Cop gets Breaking Dawn exclusives?from nonnie-confessions.tumblr.com

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Reading Kristen Stewart's "CHEATING" Pictures Through the Eyes of Foucalt Reading Manet

FOUCAULT and the CUT of MANET in PAINTING

The Foucauldian Method:

Not taking a position, but following and disentangling lines....

Foucault is less interested by what the image says than by what it produces -  the behavior that it generates, and what it leaves barely seen among the social machinery in which it distributes bodies, spaces and utterances.

 ....strategies that confine painting, to render visible what it shows, 

but equally what it conceals.

Artist: Edouard Manet

Completion Date: c.1879

Foucault Discusses Manet's The Waitress

In effect what does this picture consist of and what does it represent? Really, in a sense, it does not represent anything in so far as it offers nothing to see. In effect, you have a total here and for a total, in this picture, this figure of the waitress which you see very close to the painter, very close to the viewer, very close to us, who has a face turned suddenly turned towards us as though a spectacle has suddenly presented itself in front of her and attracted her gaze. You see that she is not looking at what she is doing, which is putting down her beer glass, but her eye has been attracted by something that we do not see, that we do not know, which is there in front of the canvas. (p 49)

....the canvas is composed of one, two, or at the most three other figures...which we almost do not see since between them we see hardly anything but the receding profile and after that we see nothing but the hat. Rather, whoever they are looking at, they are themselves looking back at them in exactly the opposite direction. What do they see? Well, we know nothing about it, we know nothing since the picture is cut in such a way that the spectacle which is there, and by which these gazes are attracted, this spectacle is also hidden form us. 

This is where Manet "breaks" with classical painting. 

Always before the spectacle was also there for us to see 

what the figures were looking at.

It is a picture where nothing is represented except two gazes, two gazes in two opposite directions, two gazes in the two opposite directions of the picture, recto verso and neither of the two spectacles which are actually followed with so much attention by the two figures, neither of these two spectacles is given to us; and to underline this, you have the curious irony of this little part of a hand that you see (on the left) and this small part of a dress.

...it is as though there is nothing to see, that the picture should consist of these gazes turned towards the invisible, showing nothing but the invisible....

From one part of the canvas to another, you have two spectacles which are seen by 

the two figures but at its root the canvas, instead of showing what is to be seen, 

hides and conceals it.(p 50)

First let us look at these 2/55 photographs  which have been included in a series of pictures in  a media manufactured Debordian world wide SPECTACLE

And let us consider them as paintings and not photographs.

What do we see?

Two figures, - in a soft out of focus shortened depth of field - a man and a woman in a heterotopian space, the front seat of a car.

The one at the top  shows the back of a woman's head facing away from us looking at something we cannot see. 

The clearest focus is the outside of the car, the handle of the car door and the pinpoint of sun reflected there. The light coming from outside the painting falls on the lower half of her back. 

. 

The upper part of the man's face  is positioned looking over her shoulder, gazing at something obliquely outside this heterotopian space, this space in western culture, the front seat of a car, a place outside of all places, a place of separation.

He seems to be looking at us, but not quite. We cannot be sure at what he is looking as his face and eye is also out of focus.

The horizontals and diagonals are in clear sharp focus. The upper silver edge of the door of the car descends from left to right sloping to the edge of the raised window, its framing and the framing of the door, the separation between the two a dark black that continues a sensuous curve around the door closure continuing down to the lower part where we observe at the bottom a reflection of what is behind, but there is nothing there. Nothing for him to see and nothing for us to see. A gaze focused on the empty landscape. 

Strangely enough it is a very beautiful photograph if observed through the eyes of Foucault. The verticals and horizontals  interrupted by diagonals draw your eye away from the two figures in shadow and out of focus in a shortened depth of field, almost as if they are there along for the ride, almost as if they are ghosts.

The lower picture has obviously been cropped and cropped stupidly and crudely. The play of the horizontal and vertical lines with the intersecting diagonals has been cut off on all four outside edges. The primary focus now is on the two figures inside the car, the heterotopian space here, in shadow. The figure of the woman is lower now.  The sunlight coming from outside the painting is falling on her shoulder, but not quite to the top of it,  which is in shadow, and it is falling on her back.

We see more of the man's face and in this lower image his eye that was opened above is now closed. It is as if the painter drew a darker line across it and his mouth is so shadowed we cannot tell if he is touching her with his lips, is about to, is withdrawing, as the focus is too blurred for us to know. too deep in shadow for anything but speculation. We cannot see if her eyes are closed, if she is looking at something, if she is looking at him, as her gaze is invisible to us.

Since we know that these are not paintings by someone influenced by Manet, but perhaps are photographs by someone with that sensibility. There is a lovely quality about them, a haunting illusion not unlike that moment Michelangelo invokes as he has God extending his hand with pointed finger towards Adam to touch him with life, with just a hair of a gap between, an almost but not quite touch, a whisper away from bestowing life.(Leo Steinberg)