Andrew Durbin - Mature Themes (v5.0) (epub).epub

Andrew Durbin’s Mature Themes is a hybrid text of poetry, art criticism, and memoir focused on the subject of disingenuity—and what constitutes "personal experience" both online and IRL when to "go deep" in a culture of so many unreliable communication technologies is to resend a text at 3 AM. Throughout the book, Durbin’s voice mutates into others in order to uncover the fading specters of meaning buried under the pristine surfaces of art and Hollywood, locating below them the other realities that structure our experience of both.

“Mature Themes negatively embraces media culture in its dizzying vortex of self-reflexivity, where facts exist only as powered by dreams, and dreams are in fact, malignant intent. It's like that, like a cat chasing its tail. Durbin's incisive and often brilliant book offers pitch-perfect feedback of a culture where to go deep is to resend an unanswered text at 3 a.m.”
―Chris Kraus

“Mature Themes is very good, but Andrew Durbin is going to die alone anyway. Not because he isn’t a very good lay, but because as it turns out, this book shows us how Andrew just can’t enjoy any luxury he seeks to accumulate. Basically, Mature Themes is a musical flood of dispassion seamlessly submerged in a paranoid takeover where any notoriety turns on living the nightmare dream. Here’s the thing―as Lauren Berlant writes, 'sitting with the loss of the world requires a supple affective infrastructure, or a religion.' Sometimes this is music, or art, or academia, or love. Andrew prefers not to be triangulated, which means the promiscuity of his work is also something that has to stretch and move and bend through this by already knowing it’s all over. And as it turns out, for Andrew, aesthetic disinterest, waning faith and terminal irony are not very good ways to find a nice Jewish girl or a homonormie partner. So he is probably going to die alone, but that’s OK, because who doesn't want a flirtatiously immovable attachment to an impossible position of doom? I’d hit it. I know you would.”
―Trisha Low

“Andrew Durbin’s Mature Themes revisits Baudelaire to ask a question: What would a critique of society look like today? Probably like the Home Shopping Network, a Justin Bieber tattoo worn by a man named Catullus #63, or the sound of an Adidas tracksuit falling. What do you get when you cross the the London riots of 2011 with a flight from PVO to SFO? Durbin’s themes re-negotiates our version of artificial paradise―the sound of spleen breaking apart and evaporating into haunted graffiti.”
―Tan Lin