Podcast
Purity & Danger
Hosted by Sylvie & Dora · EN
A pair of cultural artefacts beget thematic resonances.
16episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
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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Full Metal Hymen
Jul 13, 202502:01:17Tap to summarizePurity & Danger loses its virginity and finds it again. Sylvie and Dora, made to live as hermits in the desert, atone and are permitted to part the thighs of chastity. They are greeted by two glistening objects: the chastity belt, fetishist’s plaything moonlighting as moral insurance for medieval husbands, and the ring, seal of wifehood and girlfriendom.
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The Twins
Jun 15, 202502:01:46Tap to summarizeTwin sets of twins wash up on the shores of Purity & Danger. Sylvie and Dora see quadruple as they introduce the silent June-Alison and Jennifer Gibbons, prodigious child authors unjustly imprisoned at Broadmoor, to the deafening Dora and Leonora Hazard, cockney chorus-girls born from the imagination of 1970s fairytale-spinner Angela Carter. Special thanks go to June-Alison Gibbons, who kindly contributed her own words for this episode’s visualisation.
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