Bureau of Lost Culture

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

The counterculture has always had a dark side; it has not always been peace and love. There have been bad actors, casualties, the needle and the damage done -  and in this episode, we dive into the world of revolutionary and political violence, exploring how radical groups emerged from countercultural movements and evolved into what my guest Jason Burke describes as Revolutionists
 
 

Jason is an award-winning British author and journalist, currently serving as the International Security Correspondent for The Guardian. He is widely regarded as one of the preeminent experts on modern radicalisation terrorism, and global security, reporting from hotspots around the world.
 
 
His latest book,The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, is a sweeping history of the  period  1968–1979, a decade defined by a global explosion of secular, leftist political violence. 
 
 
The Revolutionists were the orphans of the 1960s, young people who grew up in the shadow of the 1950s’ existential vacuum of consumerism and the 1960s’ idealistic overload. When the student protests of 1968 failed to topple the global order, a radicalised minority concluded that the "System" was too resilient for peaceful protest.
 
 

It's an incredible story - and connects the counterculture with events taking place in the Middle East right now.
 
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Stephen
 
#counterculture #terrorist #terrorism #revolution #revolutionists #TheWeatherUnderground, #TheBaader-MeinhofGroup, #TheRedBrigade,  #TheJapaneseRedArmy #Baader-Meinhof #carlosthejackal

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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If you’d like to get involved and contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that really does mean a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with what we do. But that does mean we can really benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes. not just financial.  
 
 

#BureauOfLostCulture

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#ScrapArt

#IndustrialArt

#BurningManArt

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#RecycledArt

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#UndergroundCulture

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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If you’d like to get involved and contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that really does mean a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with what we do. But that does mean we can really benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes. not just financial.  
 

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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If you’d like to get involved and contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that really does mean a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with what we do. But that does mean we can really benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes. not just financial.  
 

Photograph: Courtesy of Guy Mayhew

#BureauOfLostCulture

#JoeRush

#MutoidWaste

#ScrapArt

#IndustrialArt

#BurningManArt

#Counterculture

#RecycledArt

#PostIndustrial

#UndergroundCulture

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

Here are maps that survived wars, regimes, and revolutions — not because they were valued, but because they were forgotten.
 
Some were reused when paper was scarce - a map of Cuba mounted on the reverse of a Second World War map of Berlin, the roads of one ruined city shining faintly through another place entirely, a haunting map of Hiroshima printed just weeks before destruction.

Britain’s only Professor of Cartography, James Cheshire's book The Library of Lost Maps, explores the hidden collection of thousands of maps in a room at University College London. He joins us to tell us why paper maps still matter.
 
Maps tell us what was ignored, how ideology, hope and catastrophe have been drawn onto paper; they tell us how power wanted the world to look, and they reveal hidden patterns in everyday life.
And when map libraries disappear, it isn’t just paper that vanishes — it’s memory.
 
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If you’d like to get involved and contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that really does mean a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with what we do. But that does mean we can really benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes. not just financial.  
 

 

#maps #maplibrary #hiroshima #ordnancesurvey #mapping #cartography #johnsnow #tubemap