Purity & Danger

Both of Eastern European origin, both nocturnal, both seventeen for a suspiciously long time, Purity & Danger address accusations of vampirism. Hoping to find a love greater than death, the girls look to Sweden’s favourite child-vampire romance, Let the Right One In, and Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, in which a Korean priest and his girlfriend enact a vampire Thérèse Raquin. From their castle in Notting-Hill-vania, Sylvie and Dora ponder Sheridan le Fanu, the vampire lothario, the eunuch, psychic vampirism and Russell Brand's decline and fall.

Denied a MET exhibition, Purity & Danger take the opportunity to re-tread the runway of John Galliano’s storied career. Among the wreckage of his genius, they pick out their favourite offcuts: Sylvie, his 1998 muse, costume-obsessed autist-aristocrat Marchesa Luisa Casati; Dora, his bizarre couture collections of the millennium year. Fortified by Quality Street and funded by LVMH, the girls travel from the flamenco-fuelled peninsula of Gibraltar to the hobo-chic streets of the Marais, inspired by the revolutionary Incroyables, the Belle Époque, death by sequin and 21st-century decadence.

Last episode, Sylvie and Dora termed the four-year-old Marquis de Sade a “tempestuous princelet”. Thus a new phrase was coined, definition “a wilful child possessing the imperious manner of a young noble”. In this episode the ladies risk reputational damage trawling local playgrounds for this newly identified specimen. Two candidates are unearthed: saintly Little Lord Fauntleroy, the unwitting aristocrat who launched a thousand pairs of knickerbockers, and The Tin Drum's Oskar Matzerath, the diminutive virtuoso known throughout Nazi-occupied Poland for his piercing scream. Wheeled out of the polio ward into the sunlight, the girls quail before The Blue Boy, the hunchback-by-proxy, the budding dictator of taste, the inherent evil of the child and the Oedipus complex.

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.

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