Podcast
Purity & Danger
Hosted by Sylvie & Dora · EN
A pair of cultural artefacts beget thematic resonances.
12episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
X-Rated and Illustrated
3w ago01:59:56Tap to summarizeA 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.
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Easter Islands
Apr 502:00:47Tap to summarizeTwo islands, both alike in Easter. Sylvie and Dora stand before the faces of the chiefs at Easter Island and are chased by rabbits at Ōkunoshima, Japan’s viral Rabbit Island. Hunting for eggs, they turn up Édouard Glissant’s archipelago, kawaii, an island molestation scandal and a rabbit costume incest allegory.Many thanks to Abigail Morris for the visualisation exclusive <3
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Confidential
Mar 801:58:35Tap to summarizeThis 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.
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Swan Lake
Feb 802:02:56Tap to summarizeA pas de deux, a podcast. Upon the lake of tears sit Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadisches Ballet, an experimental dancework conceived in pre-war Germany, and Truman Capote’s Swans, a group of high society women he befriended and betrayed. Pageantry, sorcery, Nazi characterology and robot ballerinas float by as Sylvie and Dora discuss what it means to be a swan.This episode's visualisation was donated by the renowned Biz Sherbert, whose generosity knows no bounds.
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Epiphany
Jan 1102:01:17Tap to summarizeSylvie 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.
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Sixteen
Dec 702:02:40Tap to summarizeA 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.
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Sleep
Nov 902:03:09Tap to summarizeSylvie 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.
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Rodeo Romeo
Oct 1202:02:58Tap to summarizeSylvie and Dora saddle up and take the Purity & Danger outfit West. They journey from Texas, site of Larry McMurtry’s 1985 frontier epic Lonesome Dove, to Hollywood, where the streets are paved with rhinestones and the spangled Nudie Suit was first donned. On the way, they shoot the breeze about all manner of cowboy: homesteading and homosexual, roughhousing and robotic.
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Birthday Post
Sep 1002:03:19Tap to summarizeSylvie and Dora start a Facebook group, turn up the volume and wait for the guests to arrive. On the eve of Sylvie’s birthday, the girls dig into the birthday cake, symbol of childhood nostalgia, and wash down its bittersweet taste with the adolescent hedonism of Project X, the 2012 mock cinema verité film that prompted a spate of teen hooliganism and generational Pavlovian response to Kid Cudi’s Pursuit of Happiness.
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Anomalistics
Aug 1002:02:30Tap to summarizeSylvie and Dora watch pensively as the study of the damned and the study of the doomed fight for the crumbs of scientific merit. A bridled nail-tail wallaby, the last of its kind, chews on a flake of a substance that looks like beef which fell from the sky moments prior. What, if anything, does the anomalous disclose?
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