There are some images that don’t simply record history—they change it.

On the morning of 11 June 1963, at a busy crossroads in Saigon, Thích Quảng Đức, a Buddhist monk, calmly sat down in the lotus position while fellow monks poured petrol over his robes. He struck a match and, as the flames engulfed him, he remained perfectly still.

The Associated Press photographer Malcolm Browne captured the moment; within hours the photograph had travelled around the world and in the years since has become one of the defining images of the 1960s: one that shocked governments, altered international opinion about Vietnam, inspired artists and activists and introduced many people to a very different understanding of Buddhism.

In this episode, I’m joined by Canadian-born US-based Professor James Shields, one of the leading scholars of Buddhist ethics and engaged Buddhism. We explore the story behind that extraordinary photograph, the long history of self-sacrifice in Buddhist tradition and how these dramatic acts have been understood over the centuries.

We branch out into the wider history of self-immolation as political protest and ask: if Buddhism generally rejects both violence and suicide, how does it distinguish between self-sacrifice and self-destruction? And what might it have to say about contemporary debates surrounding euthanasia and assisted dying?

It’s a conversation about protest, conscience and the extraordinary power of a single human act to change the course of history.

Photo: Malcolm Browne 

In the company of historian of drugs, MIKE JAY, we journey back to the first psychedelic age - not the 1960s, but the 1790s, when Britain was at the forefront, at the frontier, of gonzo psychedelic science. 

We explore the world of the 'Pneumatic Institution' in Bristol,  a community of scientists, poets, philosophers, and industrial entrepreneurs who formed a kind of proto-counterculture led by the extraordinary talents of polymath Thomas Beddoes and the boy genius Humphry Davy.

We hear about Davy's use of nitrous oxide - laughing gas - and the self-experiments and consciousness-expanding trips he and his friends experienced as a gateway to radical societal ideas and revolutionary thought, laying the groundwork for later countercultures and today's psychedelic renaissance.

More on Mike and his book Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science.

Ever thought the so-called ‘golden decade’ of the 1960s was only about peace and love? Think again. Beneath the surface, it was riddled with violence, paranoia, and chaos, even in its most iconic moments.

This is the second part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the initiator, mentor, and driving force behind The Mutoid Waste Company, that extraordinary countercultural endeavour to turn the waste of our industrial civilisation into art, performance, street theatre - and a way of life.

If you haven’t heard the first part, you might want to start here:

https://bureauoflostculture.podbean.com/e/20th-century-mutoid-man-part-1/

This time, we covered a huge amount of ground — Joe's personal story, the birth of the Mutoids and the UK counterculture of the ’80s and ’90s: squatting. We hear about the Peace Convoy, the Battle of the Beanfield, the free festival scene, the warehouse party scene, and how those worlds were pushed into exile in Europe, where they helped spark whole new cultural movements of festivals, parties, and creative rebellion including 'Tanghenge', the repurposing of abandoned Soviet MIG fighter jets after the fall of The Berlin Wall and much more..

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Stephen 

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The Weather Underground, The Baader-Meinhof Group, The Red Brigade, Carlos the Jackal, The Japanese Red Army.

Beyond the official story, the myth, of the Second World War — its maps and medals, courage and sacrifice — there is another hidden narrative. Written in rare memoirs, or in letters and diaries never meant to be read by us, it tells of a kind of underground culture that was secret, transgressive, forbidden

With millions of young men and women on military service, the transitory nature of life under threat of sudden and violent death created a charged atmosphere in which conventional boundaries loosened. In London the darkness of the blackout became both cover and catalyst.

Writer and cultural critic Luke Turner, is the author of the beautiful book  Men at War, Loving, Lusting, Fighting, Remembering 1939-1945, a book that excavates the sexual undercurrents of wartime Britain, how the social upheaval of wartime had a profound effect on the sex lives of British men in particular— in the city, in barracks, in prison of war camps. 

This is a story that feels less like military history and more like testimonies from an underground scene — improvised, poignant usually invisible - and later to be deliberately repressed..

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IMAGE: Cecil Beaton /Imperial War Museum

#sex #war #military #queerhistory #londonhistory #blitz #transgressive #

If you had been at the Glastonbury Festival in 1987,  you may have seen a familiar silhouette emerging in the dawn light  - upright monoliths arranged in a circle. Was it Stonehenge - magically transferred here across the Salisbury plain?

No, it was ‘Carhenge'- a circle of upright cars, their chassis standing like monoliths, the archaeology of the automobile age

And imagine ‘Tankhenge', a gateway made from abandoned Soviet tanks assembled in Berlin just after the fall of the Berlin Wall — the wreckage of the Cold War turned into a piece of anarchic sculpture

Or imagine a huge mechanical creature crawling across the desert at the Burning Man festival in Nevada

These strange and spectacular visions all come from the same source: The Mutoid Waste Company— a collective that, since the early 1980s, has been transforming the debris of industrial civilisation into giant sculptures, mutant vehicles and temporary worlds built from waste.

This is the first part of our conversation with Joe Rush, the artist at the centre of it all. It takes us into the world of late 1970s West London, the punk years, the alternative communities and squats of the People's Republic of Frestonia, and the signpist along the way to becoming a Mutoid...

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Photograph: Courtesy of Guy Mayhew

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#PostIndustrial

#UndergroundCulture

In the heart of London’s Bloomsbury, behind a scruffy turquoise door, the world lies folded into drawers.