iPrincess Diaries

LitFest Pasadena

2013-05-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

This Saturday I will be reading from my novella Wives Shows, about reality TV wives, at LitFest Pasadena. I will be casting the audience in roles as "wives."

I go on at 2:55 on the stage, and finish around 3:15. Would love to see you there!

LITFEST PASADENA IS BACK!

Saturday, May 11 * 10am-5pm *

Pasadena's Central Park

Join over 80 renowned authors and performers and 40 exhibitors for a fantastic, fun filled day of readings, panels, and performances for all ages!

View our schedule of events on three stages and exhibitors online now at www.litfestpasadena.org!

The Polished You

2013-05-06T22:51:00.004-07:00

A few years ago I created/conceived of a chapbook for V Places' factory series, called The Polished You, and Amaranth Borsuk wrote about the work for a piece on conceptions of authorship in the digital age for JEP. Writing The Polished You was an interesting experience for me, in that I conceived of using the Nancy Taylor book (which is the same book I used for my Prices Upon Request performance) since I thought it'd be most compelling to appropriate another text as Place would be appropriating mine, and because the Nancy Taylor book's author was "unknown," raising further questions of authorship, and because using this text would allow readers to further the level of appropriation by adding in their own words in the survey section. I had people send in their images of "their" books to me, as was featured in HTML GIANT.

Borsuk writes:

"This contradiction perhaps reaches its zenith in Vanessa Place’s Factory Series, a set of print-on-demand chapbooks written by her contemporaries to which she (with their permission) has affixed her own name. The project’s very title plays on Andy Warhol’s appropriative approach to art, which, like conceptualism, attributed as much value to idea as to artifact.[23] The project itself thus plays with notions of authorship. For example, The Polished You, contributed by performance artist and poet Kate Durbin, appropriates selections from a 1960s finishing school workbook from the four-volume Nancy Taylor Course. Durbin’s source text is aptly chosen for the ways it highlights questions of selfhood and authorship. The book takes the form of a survey inviting “a completely honest self-evaluation” by the reader in the interest of determining “what type of woman you are, and, more importantly, the type of woman you want to be.”[24] Questions range from analyses of one’s face, figure, and interests to considerations of how others perceive one, culminating in an objective “comprehensive picture of yourself.” In every case, the questions are subjective: for example, “Is your face pretty?”, “Do you enjoy making up your face and styling your hair?”, “What subject, other than yourself, are you most interested in?”, and “What do you want most out of life?”. Many also provide a limited range of potential answers: “How do you think you appear to others? Sophisticated? Clean-cut and wholesome? Sexy? Tomboyish? Why do you think you appear this way?” Still others hint at the author’s own values: “Describe the kind of environment you enjoy most. Casual? Plush? Intellectual? Sophisticated? Avant-garde? A combination of these? Some other? Why?” In juxtaposing these questions, the text highlights the absurdity of its own premise and encourages readers to reflect on how the self is constructed (“Do people consider you active, average, or passive? Do you agree with this? Why?”), and, by extension, how authorship is built. Each page provides several blank lines for the reader to respond to these prompts, further complicating questions of The Polished You’s authorship.

Whose text is this—the author listed on the title page, Vanessa Place; her surrogate, Kate Durbin; the reader who fills in the blanks; or the text’s original author Nancy Taylor, who may herself have been a pseudonym for another writer? According to Library of Congress records, the 1971 copyright entry (the edition Durbin used) lists “ITT Educational Services” as the applicant and “Taylor Career Programs” as the book’s author.[25] Was there ever a Nancy Taylor? The secretarial school bearing her name was founded in 1964 by an entrepreneur named Bert Schiff to provide vocational training and finishing classes to women, but Schiff transformed it in the 1970s into the Taylor Business Institute, which currently offers associate degrees in a range of skills including accounting, medical billing, and electronics engineering.[26] A note at the end of the chapbook acknowledges “the author of the texts is unknown,” pointing to the central question of the book: What does it mean to be known, and how do we know ourselves?"

You can read the entire article here.

Megan Milks Reviews Kept Women

2013-05-06T13:49:00.000-07:00

I love this review of Kept Women by Megan Milks for Fanzine:

"Kept Women is quintessential Durbin: strange, beguiling, and funny in a nervous, beyond-ironic way. In these poems, the mansion’s residents have vacated the premises; what we know of them arrives through their rooms and the objects within them."

Interview in The Conversant

2013-05-02T15:06:00.001-07:00

The brilliant Virginia Konchan conducted an intense interview with me for The Conversant. We talked Gaga, Women as Objects, the gurlesque, etc.

Tonight in NYC

2013-04-30T18:28:00.001-07:00

(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧SILENT DRAPE RUNNERS & ANIMALNewYork PRESENT*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

(✿◠‿◠) G1RLZ NI†E (◠‿◠✿)

*:✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･*

"GIRLZ NITE" is a dance + video art party celebrating fresh video art by local and international artists. It's a shamelessly feminine pop-up art experience co-opting a club aesthetic. Come see selfie and net-based works that are good & a get down time.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

DJs:

PRINCE RAMA
CHIPPY NONSTOP
SILENT DRAPE RUNNERS

+performance by Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

FEATURED ARTISTS:

Alexandra Gorczynski, Petra Cortright, Carla Gannis, Bunny Rogers, Angela Washko, Casey Jane Ellison, Laura McMillian, Saoirse Wall, Actually Huzienga, Giselle Zatonyl, Mary Rachel Kostreva, Erica Lapadat-Janzen, Jessie Stead and more!
+ Kate Durbin, Rollin Leonard, Anthony Antonellis, Systaime...
*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

HOSTS:

Julia Kaganskiy (#ArtsTech, The Creators Project)
Kait "#TheDutchessofKent" Browne
Anthony Tran (BIRFDAY BOI!!!)
Cammisa Buerhaus
Rhinestone Gorilla Burlesque
Zoo Lion

･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

FREE
21+
Complimentary drinks via drink ticket between 10 and 11 pm

The DL

95 Delancey St., New York, New York 10002

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧:*

(｡♥‿♥｡) C - U - SOON (｡♥‿♥｡)

Finkelstein Reviews Kept Women for Lemon Hound

2013-04-28T18:36:00.002-07:00

Rachel Finkelstein wrote a really interesting review of my latest chapbook, Kept Women, for Lemon Hound. I like her discussion of the work's "defeat" and "bleakness" (not included in this excerpt), as I think my conceptual strategy lends itself to reading the work ultimately as incredibly bleak/depressing or incredibly liberating, in that it leaves the reader a lot of space to come to their own conclusions.

Here is a snippet. Click through for full review:

Durbin echoes Marilyn Frye’s proposal to “consider the birdcage*.*” One might recall the birdcage as Frye’s visual metaphor conveying oppression as a force of many powers. Durbin’s poems are cages, restricted spaces inhabited by replicated books, sexy devil / angel costumes, insects frozen in amber—women “kept” as objects. The poem “Stone Sanctuary” gives a particularly disturbing portrait of female entrapment: “Modeled on / prehistoric caves in France, the grotto’s glass ceiling is implanted with/panels of prehistoric objects and insects rapt in amber.”

Like the glass slipper in Cinderella, the objects of Kept Women glimmer with a potential magic for enactment. These objects are unable to function autonomously and are positioned for use, such as in “Baronial Bachelor Pad,” “A curved double/staircase, perfect for late night drunken banister sliding or posing for/pre-red carpet event photos.”

Many times an object will crack in presentation, allowing the object to exude subtle defeat. There’s an unexpected sympathy for the sponges in the grotto shower that “once were natural, living creatures,” —a sadness in the performance of designated, fixed roles which are dutifully carried out.

LA Readings Tomorrow!

2013-04-19T16:35:00.003-07:00

I am reading in LA twice tomorrow!

***********

The Poetic Research Bureau presents...

A book launch for
THE SONNETS: TRANSLATING & REWRITING SHAKESPEARE
Edited by Sharmila Cohen & Paul Legault

Featuring readings by:

Kate Durbin
Julia Bloch
Kelli Anne Noftle
Martha Ronk
& more

Saturday, April 20 2013
Doors open @ 7pm, reading starts @ 7:30pm

The Poetic Research Bureau @ Telic Arts
951 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA

The Sonnets, edited by the founding editors of the translation journal Telephone, pairs 154 poet-translators with each of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets--literally rewriting history, or at least the great Bard's poetic oeuvre. This collection of English-to-English "translations" includes work by Rae Armantrout, Mary Jo Bang, Jen Bervin, Paul Celan, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, Donald Revell, Jerome Rothenberg, Juliana Spahr, and many others.

In the tradition of Ezra Pound's Cathay or Jack Spicer's After Lorca, these versions explore the themes of their originals while completely re-authoring them--imagining a new Shakespeare, self-described in his dedication to The Sonnets as: "THE WELL-WISHING. ADVENTURER ... SETTING FORTH."

http://distranslation.com/index.php?%2Fthe-sonnets%2Fthe-sonnets%2F

2013-04-06T15:40:00.002-07:00

JUPITER 88 READING

2013-03-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

Had so much fun reading a short excerpt from Kept Women for the amazing CA Conrad's Jupiter 88 series. *Now with fixed link!

Kept Women on HTML Giant's MUST READ List

2013-03-17T23:00:00.000-07:00

Honored to be on HTML Giant's must read list by Christopher Higgs.

"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 the way she does it. A rare quality and certainly worth attention."

The Next Big Thing Interview

2013-03-11T19:25:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Davis Schneiderman for tagging me for The Next Big Thing. Read super short answers about Kept Women here.

Tagging Bianca Stone, Jon Rutzmoser, and Joseph Mosconi.

PNCA Magazine Interview

2013-03-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

Meghan Vicks and I are featured in PNCA's online magazine, UNTITLED, answering three questions about our creative processes.

Read here.

Jade Lascalles Interviews Me and Amaranth Borsuk

2013-03-03T13:41:00.001-08:00

for Gesture magazine. We talked extensively about our project Abra, forthcoming in iOS and artist's book editions.

Read it here.

The Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic in Hyperallergic

2013-03-03T13:37:00.001-08:00

I co-wrote an article with Alicia Eler coining the Teen-Girl Tumblr Aesthetic for Hyperallergic art magazine this past week, articulating the movement I've been exploring for the past couple of years with my tumblr project Women as Objects.

We discussed Elisa Lam, Francesca Woodman, Sylvia Plath, Marie Calloway, Molly Soda, Will Cotton, Tracy Emin, and more. Check it out here.

Seth Oelbaum reviews Kept Women for Bambi Muse

2013-02-27T20:00:00.000-08:00

"Once during a dastardly day of weird straight boy performance artists, Brooklyn, and white people, Baby Adolf took solace from all the sordidness in the splendor of Kate Durbin’s Kept Women, a tiny collection of prose poems that’s a part of the Parrot chapbook series. Each poem in Kept Women describes a room or place or in the Playboy Mansion."

Carina Finn Reviews Kept Women for Montevidayo

2013-02-22T16:33:00.001-08:00

I love Carina Finn's bratty and smart and fun and personal response to Kept Women. She also calls out conceptual poetry for often being boring and irrelevant.

"What’s different about Kate’s poetry is that it has both an overt and fully-formed Concept which governs it and meets my perhaps unfair standards of what a hardworking poem should be achieving. In moments like “insects rapt in amber” in Stone Sanctuary, the poem describing a shower/waterfall/grotto, the ingenuity of the author pierces the flattened affect of the project. The reader becomes, like the illustrated insect, rapt, aware of their suspension in this world that is at once entirely organic and entirely artificial." -Finn

Women as Objects and Girls, Online in Flavorwire

2013-02-20T16:54:00.002-08:00

The fabulous and smart Sophie Weiner wrote about my tumblr work in an article for Flavorwire, along with a discussion of Kitty Pryde & Kelly McNutt.

"Durbin is interested in the aesthetics of being a teenage girl in Western culture, and how separated these ideals can be from the real experiences of young women. The instability of and girls’ dissociation from symbols like the Chanel logo begin to get at the undercurrent of darkness that is evident in a lot of recent art focused on what it’s like to be a teen girl today." -Weiner

Check it out here.

Review of Kept Women by Sean Reynolds

2013-02-16T18:56:00.000-08:00

“Kept Women has the genius cadence of the Shining” writes Kari Larsen in her review of, “Kept Women” by Kate Durbin.

I believe that statement is hauntingly correct, because this small collection of prose poems describing the “carved walnut paneling,” and “dark red Valette rugs” of the Playboy Mansion has left me too with the feeling of ghostly disjointed, dark energy residing in the Overlook Hotel, rather than the opulence and gaiety often associated with one of Hollywood’s most famous party grounds. Durbin’s work is not for the casual reader, not for the non-observer or anyone for that matter who is not willing to meditate honestly over the American “Hollywood” ideal of women as objects.

Meditate is the right word I think because there is no overt statement in KW. No smoking gun of inequality or denial of rights, there is more a feeling of desperate participation, (by both sexes) in a flawed cultural paradigm.

“There is a also a row of twenty silk women’s pajamas in various sizes, shrouded in plastic.” -Durbin

I think KW is harder for men to connect with. We are caught flatfooted, but the heavy-handed, male/money dominated model is shifting in this country. In its wake a new energy is emerging. I think these are exiting times, but not without a lot of creative soul searching. Sensuality and creativity are not ghosts of the past; they are the emerging saviors of the future. If we need crazy energy to tear the old model apart I don’t think it will come from Jack Torrance at the Outlook Hotel, but watch out for Hello Kitty she wields a mean axe.

-Sean Reynolds

Meghan Vicks and my talk with PNCA about Gaga Stigmata

2013-02-14T00:17:00.000-08:00

6 Sec Vine Video Contest for ANIMAL

2013-02-11T19:52:00.000-08:00

Stoked to have my video PEEPUNK featured on ANIMAL's site for their 6 Sec Video Contest.

Beyond Baroque Reading

2013-02-10T13:17:00.000-08:00

February 17th HITCHED will feature KATE DURBIN with LINDA LAY and NATALIE DIAZ with SARAH VAP. HITCHED is a monthly reading series that couples established poets and writers with newer voices as a way to broaden community and celebrate writing relationships.

$7 at the door, $5 for students, FREE for members
Hosted by XOCHITL-JULISA BERMEJO

BIOS------------------

KATE DURBIN is a Los Angeles-based writer, performer, and transmedia artist. She is author of The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books) and E! Entertainment (Blanc Press Diamond Edition, forthcoming). She is co-author of Abra, forthcoming in artists' book and iOS editions. She is a recipient the Expanded Artists' Book grant from Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and the winner of an &Now Innovative Writing Award. She is founding editor of Gaga Stigmata, an online arts and criticism journal about Lady Gaga, which has been featured in news outlets such as Salon.com, NPR, AOL, and Yale's The American Scholar. Her tumblr project, Women as Objects, has been featured in TMobile's Your Digital Daily, Hyperallergic, Bright Stupid Confetti, and other news and arts sites, and she has presented it at Cal Arts, the WeHo Library, and for the School of Global Arts Down Under.

NATALIE DIAZwas born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. Having played professional basketball for four years in western Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University in 2007. She has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize and her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Nimrod International, and North American Review. She lives in Surprise, Arizona.

LINDA LAY received her B.F.A. in Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Otis College of Art and Design. Currently she teaches at an alternative private school and is actively involved in the art and writing communities of Los Angeles. For more information and work samples, please visit www.lindalay.com.

SARAH VAP grew up in Missoula, Montana. She attended Brown University, where she studied English and American Literature. She received her MFA from Arizona State University, and is completing her PhD at the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment of the Arts grant.

She is the author of four collections of poetry. Her first book, Dummy Fire, was selected by Forrest Gander to receive the Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Her second, American Spikenard, was selected by Ira Sadoff to receive the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her third book, Faulkner’s Rosary, was released by Saturnalia Books in 2010. She lives with her family in Santa Monica, CA.

Images from MOCA Geffen Performance w/ Adam Overton

2013-02-03T19:50:00.000-08:00

Performance at MOCA Geffen

2013-01-30T22:08:00.002-08:00

I will be performing at MOCA Geffen with Adam Overton this Saturday. Please come!

1-2pm Saturday, Feb 2, 2013
in the ZINE WORLD THEATER at MOCA Geffen
as part of the LA Art Book Fair
https://www.facebook.com/LaArtBookFair
$free!

Signify, Sanctify, Believe’s inspirational outreach chapter, the Saints and Servants of the Order of [Con]Temporary Religious Observance, proudly presents the newest temporary evangelical organization to enter its proselytic fold: Turbani Rugduke Guru Urchch. Led by pastors Kate Durbin and Guru Rugu, Turbani Rugduke Guru Urchch will lead an hour-long church service featuring inspirational artist-led prayers, sing-a-longs, and sermons for casual spiritualists and curious heathens alike.

Join us.

Art Censorship & the Internet

2013-01-23T16:31:00.000-08:00

I got Hyperallergic censored from FB.

My chapbook "Kept Women" included on Ms. Magazine's Best of 2012 Poetry List!

2013-01-19T12:56:00.003-08:00

Very honored!

From the write-up by Amanda Montei:

Kate Durbin’s Kept Women (Insert Blanc Press) : The newest chapbook from Los Angeles-based Insert Blanc Press‘s PARROT series, this book is only 12 pages long but, like all of Durbin’s work, it is thoroughly Hollywood and completely feminist. In an eerie real-estate-catalog-meets-fairy-tale voice, the poems describe the Playboy mansion in exhausting detail, though never directly reference the infamous bunnies or Hef, creating a complex commentary on the objectifying Hefner franchise. Also check out her Tumblr project “Women as Objects”!

Read the entire list here.