Bureau of Lost Culture

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..

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...

And if you're listening in March 2026 it coincides with the opening of his latest exhibition -Unnatural - at The Bomb Factory

Photograph: Courtesy of Guy Mayhew

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#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.
 

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

This is the second part of a conversation with Alaura O’Dell / Mistress Mix, formerly known as Paula P-Orridge.

In the first part, we traced Alaura’s journey from meeting the musician and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, as a 15-year-old schoolgirl in East London, to becoming a central actor in the underground art band Psychic TV and the occult network Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). 

While public accounts often focus on TOPY’s founder, Genesis P-Orridge, we heard about Alaura's role in the organisation — not just as a participant, but as an organiser and practitioner, the one “who handled the workings”: the practical magick behind the grand metaphysical ideas.  

In this episode, we rejoin Alaura and Genesis as they are in Kathmandu with their kids. Caress and Genesse. Back in Britain, the police have raided their home, prompted by unfounded accusations of moral deviance and child abuse in the media, during the infamous 'satanic panic'of the 1980s. 

We hear how they embarked on a life in exile in California, finding unexpected refuge with the family of Winona Ryder and entering a new West Coast countercultural milieu that included encounters with Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna. before hearing about Alaura's life after Psychic TV, TOPY and Genesis.

Psychic TV, was a multimedia art and music project that blurred boundaries between performance, ritual, and experimentation in sound and imagery, imbued with a sense of magick (in both the occult and transformative senses)

Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY),was  a loosely structured global network of artists, occultists, and seekers that emerged in the 1980s. 

#AlauraODell
#PaulaP’Orridge
#GenesisP’Orridge
#TempleOvPsychicYouth
#Counterculture
#SacredSites
#PersonalReinvention
#SpiritualAwakening
#TraumaAndHealing
#CreativeExpression
#ExileAndResilience
#TimothyLeary
#terencemckenna
#PsychicTVHistory

Over the last century, the word Shaman has been embraced by artists, hippies, psychonauts and spiritual rebels.

In the 1960s and 70s, shamanism had become a kind of countercultural shorthand for altered states, secret, magical knowledge, and ways of seeing outside rationalism, capitalism, and institutional power.

Shamans appeared in underground books, on psychedelic record sleeves, in communes and consciousness-raising circles. Writers like Carlos Castaneda blurred the line between ethnography and spiritual fiction. Psychedelics were framed as modern shamanic initiation rites. 

But as shamanism was absorbed into Western counterculture, the messy realities of the original shamanic cultures - land, lineage, service to the community, and sometimes danger - were replaced with personal visions, journeys and individual transformation.

Our guest today is social anthropologist Max Carocci whose work looks at how this happened. His latest book, Shamans: The Visual Culture, is an incredible portrait of the original shamanic worlds with an eclectic array of the sacred objects, tools, clothing and images shamans have made, along with the way they been photographed, filmed, and mythologised. 

Max is especially interested in how these images have turned the shaman into a symbolic figure — part spiritual rebel, part cypher for Western longing — while the original shamans continue to live under pressure from colonialism, repression and environmental loss.

#counterculture, #shamanism, #shaman, #tuvan, #galba, #newage, #spiritualisn, #magic, #ancestor