Purity & Danger
Sadomasochism Summer w/ Lydia Eliza Trail
I Have No Back, and I Must Rooms
The Dunhamesque
The Scapegoat Summit w/ Fiona Duncan
Sylvie & Dora
X-Rated and Illustrated
Confidential
Epiphany
Sixteen
Sleep
1 of 3
by Sylvie & Dora
A threesome come together in an ecstasy of Sadean delight. In this guest episode, art critic and sexual adventurer Lydia Eliza Trail seeks refuge at Purity & Danger’s pleasure palace to speak upon infamous French pornographer the Marquis de Sade. Dosed with Spanish fly, Sylvie, Dora and Lydia are introduced to the libertine world of commoners and kings. There they are bound, whipped and stimulated by talk of Sade’s multiple imprisonments, the duality of Justine and Juliette, Angela vs. Camille vs. Simone, Sadean couple Kanye and Bianca, the motorcycle vs. the washing machine, and the latent shame that accompanies promiscuity.
Purity & Danger charge up the modem and hack the mainframe. Noclipped out of reality, newly minted console cowboys Sylvie and Dora discover the Backrooms, a labyrinthine alternate universe extrapolated from a cursed image of an abandoned furniture store posted on 4chan, and the AI-controlled post-apocalyptic hellscape of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a 1995 video game inspired by a Harlan Ellison short story. The girls are translated into binary and, wandering through a yet inexperienced cyberspace template, hear the echoes and reverberations of liminal space, cyberpunk, H.R. Giger’s biomechanical art, and hauntology.
Purity & Danger join the long-awaited Lena Dunham renaissance. Impatient and afraid, hungry and heartbroken, Sylvie and Dora reflect upon her prodigious smash-hit Girls in the light of her recent tell-all memoir Famesick. The pitfalls of early fame, confessional writing, twee-on-twee crime and the hipster are all pieces of the puzzle that is the Dunhamesque.
This week we bring you a special guest episode… our first. Fiona (Alison) Duncan, celebrated writer and founder of literary social practice Hard to Read, joins us for The Scapegoat Summit: an in-depth exploration of René Girard’s thoughts on mimetic violence, imitative desire and their conservative appeal. Compulsory heterosexuality, Lena Dunham, woke 2.0 and the secret angels of the world cut through anecdotes and reminiscences as we three try to understand how Girard morphed from a prophet of deviated transcendence to the Godfather of the like.
What’s in a name? Sylvie and (Isa)dora tell you. Sylvie watches “Sylvie”, a 1973 German TV film about a doomed romance between a cab-driver-cum-sailor and a model, and Dora watches “Isadora, The Biggest Dancer in the World”, Ken Russell’s tribute to the Mother of Modern Dance. Following in the footsteps of their namesakes, Sylvie and Dora skip, twirl and leap through rival manifestos by German filmmakers, a Nietzschean theory of dance, an ashram brought down by a beautiful secretary, and the unjust treatment of aging female eccentrics. P.s. Sorry from the bottom of our hearts for the intermittent mic interference. We still don’t fully understand how to use the mics.
A lanky provocateur, a pencil, and an Amazonian objet d'art who might snap her creator in half like one. A winning formula unites Robert Crumb’s incendiary cartoons and Namio Harukawa’s monomaniacal smut. Lost in the badlands of X-rated illustration, Sylvie and Dora argue about who is more callipygian, historicise erotica and battle the beautiful fighting girl, denizen of the girlish abyss.
This episode is strictly confidential. Jeffrey Epstein’s little black book meets Peter Thiel’s 2004 essay ‘The Straussian Moment’ at an undisclosed location. Sylvie and Dora pick over a heap of discarded documents. Among the detritus they find the scapegoat, the Antichrist and the Man from O.R.G.Y. All will be revealed in this, our 19th episode.
Sylvie and Dora confront Epiphany’s Janus face. The festive agitator Lord of Misrule parleys with William Holman Hunt’s sanctimonious painting ‘The Awakening Conscience’. Episode 17 is awash with mock legislature, fallen women and cosmological contrariety.
A female monarch, a boy writer, a podcast, numerologically united. In Purity & Danger’s sixteenth episode, Thomas Baty, alias Irene Clyde, dares to dream of gender utopia in Beatrice the Sixteenth’s desert dynasty, and a sixteen-year-old John Kennedy Toole begins The Neon Bible, his first work of fiction. Four to the power of two equals Tavi Gevinson’s internet juvenilia, teen pregnancy, an aristocratic third gender and the picaresque year of 2016.
Sylvie and Dora take to bed. They curl up in the sticky embrace of the Great Bed of Ware, a 16th century bedstead from an oversexed Hertfordshire town, and are rudely awakened by the Russian Sleep Experiment, a creepypasta about chemically-induced insomnia in the Soviet Union. Rolling around on the kingsize mattress of sleep history, Sylvie and Dora lie with the biphasic medieval period, 20th century amphetamine-fuelled warfare, and millennial internet folklore.