Noughties

By Kate Durbin

• Description
• Reviews

• A glittering reimagining of her 2014 cult classic E! Entertainment, which was ahead of its time in taking the "bimbos" of reality TV seriously, Noughties reanimates the media systems that made the women of the 2000s into spectacle and then swallowed us all.
  
  In Kate Durbin’s Noughties, a creepy yet charming docent leads us through the labyrinth of the Playboy Mansion, gossiping and pointing out every dog turd and missing bowl of cocaine. In new and radically reworked writings from E!, Kim Kardashian’s wedding decays into a hyper-branded, glitching gothic, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills'  "Dinner Party from Hell" transmutes into occult séance, and a meticulously transcribed episode of The Hills turns vocal fry and Balenciaga motorcycle bags into dream grammar.
  
  Most pieces in Noughties were first composed through Durbin’s unique process of intensive surfacing, where she would watch a few frames of a show, pause, and write down everything she saw and heard--including all the background details and side players you're not supposed to notice. She then transformed the material into stories and poems recast out of the shows' own uncanny matter and machinery. A completely new addition, Durbin’s playful ink drawings bring in Bridget Marquardt’s pink Hello Kitty bedroom, tabloids as poems, and Paris and Nicole "that’s hot" rewatch memes, for a feverish, singular artwork of a dirty decade that never really ended.

  
  

• Previous Praise:
  

  There is no one sporting hypermediaflesh like Kate Durbin’s. She strips the TV image from its old curves, reupholstering 2D-packed pixelshit into clipped components, sentences, where somehow less surrounded they take on the shape of psychically deformed wallpaper. These are our icon baths hobbling toward you, reciting script-prayer in mime of sleep, and now Durbin is their lord."
  Blake Butler

  Though the swift-moving spectacle of the television show invites viewers to cast easy judgment on these hoarders, Durbin employs poetry's slower speed to show a more complicated picture. Instead of using [these stories] to make us feel better about ourselves for not being hoarders, she indicts aspects of American culture we all participate in—religion, capitalism—and reveals our complicity, all the while dropping a lot of sight gags in the process.
  Rich Smith, The Stranger

  I call Kate Durbin one of the most compelling contemporary American writers because I feel like she’s in her own lane. No one does what she does in the way that she does it.”
  Christopher Higgs, HTML Giant

  [Durbin’s writing is] even more surreal than what we get on TV, and also subversively funny. XO Jane

  Durbin uses her alchemy to transform something that is already unreal, reality TV, the result is unnamable. You can’t slow down time where time doesn’t exist. Yet Durbin does. She’s a witch.
  Myriam Gurba, Radar Productions