This name kept coming up in links on my Facebook “Kate Durbin” “Kate Durbin” “Kate Durbin.” I began investigating Kate Durbin, I found amazing videos on Youtube like this one called iPrincess. I looked at her Hello Selfie photos, she went to LA and NYC and walked the streets with other women all wearing strange (I don’t know how to describe their outfits, I’m sorry) outfits covered in stickers taking selfies of themselves. I began a short email conversation with Kate Durbin and found her to be amazing, charming, intensely sensitive/philosophical/observant and even spiritually powerful, I got E! Entertainment in the mail and read it immediately, in it Kate Durbin wrote out scenes from reality television shows, the extent of the project amazed me, how much effort and detail she threw into it, I was blown away, so much indie literature is personal narrative or experimental, but she took it in a completely new direction.
Kate Durbin also has a Tumbrl called “Women as Objects” where she reblogs posts from teenage girls.
Here is an amazing interview with Kate Durbin and Lara Glenum.
Noah Cicero: What would be three books or films or television shows that you really like and try to experience over and over again and why. And then three books or films or television shows that inspired E! Entertainment?
Kate Durbin: I watch The Shining at least once month. Kubrick’s creation of a foreboding atmosphere is terrific, as are his little hidden details that connect all his projects together, like Danny wearing the Apollo 11 sweater in the Overlook hotel hallway, which is a nod to Kubrick faking the moon landing. I put details like that in all of my work, hoping one day someone will parcel them out.
I read Anna Kavan’s Ice every few months. I like how she created her own environment in that text, this suffocating ice world, and also how nothing is explained. I like works of art that are bold enough to be unaccommodating, like an alien world.
Robert Altman’s Three Women is an important film for me. Visually it is beautiful, with these dreamy 70s pinks and purples. I like that it was inspired by a dream Altman had and therefore follows dream logic. I like that it’s about these women and their relationships to each other, which is what E is about, too.
Inspired E: The Hills, The Girls Next Door, Keeping Up With the Kardashians