Purity & Danger

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 thr...

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 fil...

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.

Two 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

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.

A 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...

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 ar...

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 cent...

Sylvie 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.

Sylvie 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...

Sylvie 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?

Purity & 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.

Twin 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...

A scandal breaks as two Hollywood veterans are scooped up from the cutting room floor. Sylvie and Dora clutch their pearls at Kenneth Anger’s spurious history of cinema’s Golden Age and Anita Loos’ blonde-bashing memoir of industrious coquettedom, stopping along the way to discuss the loveable scamp, the tactical bob and the ethics of excess.

Donald Barthelme’s incontinent colossal father and Giulio Romano’s tempestuous sons of Gaia both crash to earth in narratives of giant vanquishing. Sylvie and Dora explore giants in their various guises — the bellicose, the libidinous, the grotesque, the innocent and the divine — and defend the honour of each.

Slavic Art Deco superstar Tamara de Lempicka and her pioneering automobile-self-portrait collides with Crash , J. G. Ballard’s lurid tale of symphorophiliac entanglement. Sylvie and Dora travel through the crepuscular netherworld of pornography, down the straight line that is the badge of man, towards the future.

Oskar Kokoschka’s swan-skin effigy of Austria’s most assiduous heartthrob, Alma Mahler, meets hoity toity foil, Cynthia, a mannequin-socialite brought to life by window-dresser Lester Gaba.

Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli suckles at the Capitoline Wolf’s imperial teat. Sylvie and Dora discuss feral children and their symbolic environs.

Nuremberg’s non-verbal wunderkind meets Paul Auster’s monomaniacal sleuth in a warm embrace of developmental abnormality. Sylvie and Dora ask, is language innate?

A style war has broken out in the imaginary sex county! Jilly Cooper’s 'Rutshire Chronicles' and Peter York and Ann Barr’s 'Sloane Ranger Handbook' undress the stylistic arsenal of the British class system.

Acts of God, subjectivity under duress, and the interminable negotiation between nature and civility; what can Edwin Landseer's haunted painting 'Man Proposes, God Disposes' and Ruben Östlund's 'Force Majeure' teach us about the human condition?

The Fabergé Egg faces off with Piet Hein's Superegg. Their curvaceous confrontation invites us to reflect on cultural production, empire and divination.