*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast curious, half-forgotten, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and rare tales from the underground.
*Join host Stephe...
Genesis P-Orridge was a performance artist, neo Pagan, Industrial music innovator, the co-founder of COUM, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV and an arch provocateur. He was variously described as a wrecker of civilisation, transgressive and blasphemous, accused of being a Satanist and of sexually abusing his children (a lie - in fact he was a loving father and grandfather), and claimed to be a threat to society. He could be both very alarming and very kind.
In later life Genesis became infamous with attempts to unite as a “pandrogyne”, a single entity, with partner Lady Jaye through the use of extreme surgical body modification intended to make them physically resemble one another
Filmaker David Charles Rodrigues, director of S/HE IS STILL HERE an extraordinary, moving film based around interviews made in the last months of Genesis's life, came to the Bureau to talk about the Cut Up technique, William Burroughs, Bryon Gysin, The Exploding Galaxy, industrial music, the Satanic Panic and much more in the life and death of a deeply countercultural artist.
#genesis p-orridge #throbbinggristle #coum #psychictv #thetempleofpsychicyouth #industrialmusic #templeofpsychicyouth #pandrogyne #coseyfannitutti #chrisandcosey #williamburroughs #bryongysin #cutup #thecutuptechnique #ica #censorship #transgressive #satanicpanic #ladyjaye #thexxplodinggalaxy
--------
1:00:34
Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream
In the turbulent late 1970s, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside.
They would share their new home with over fifty other residents - idealists from all over the world - armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism and drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world.
They did not leave for fifteen years.
This was not a hippie commune or a new age retreat but a community run on radical socialist Marxist principles. Yet, however noble the intentions of the adults, was this suitable place - a suitable home - for a child to grow up?
Susanna wrote a book to try to answer that question and came to the Bureau to tell us all about it - and about the pleasures and perils of growing up in the fallout of the Utopian Dream.
More on Susanna
More on her book Home Is Where We Start
More on British Intentional Communities
--------
1:03:45
The Man Who Wrote the Joy of Sex
The Joy of Sex was published in 1972 and for years, was rarely out of the bestseller lists, generating sequels, revised editions and a lot of imitators - so how could it be countercultural?
For two reasons: firstly that Dr Alex Comfort who wrote it was a deeply countercultural figure, and second, because its publication represents the moment when the sexual revolution of the countercultural years of the late '50s and ‘60s, threw off its remaining clothes and dived naked into the bourgeous middle class mainstream.
And it changed a lot of peoples’ live - well their sex lives at any rate.
Social justice journalist activist and anarchist Eric Laursen, author of Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort, came to The Bureau to tell of the poet, novelist, doctor, biologist, gerontologist, anarchist, scientific humanist, public intellectual, pacifist and activist who also happened to write the world’s most famous guide to lovemaking..
For More on Eric
For More on Polymath: The Life and Professions of Dr. Alex Comfort
#sex #sexguide #thejoyofsex #alexcomfort #thesexualrevolution #counterculture #sexmanual #sandstone
--------
1:07:19
High Society - Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture
*Every society is a high society. Getting high has been a pursuit of civilisations throughout time.
*Every day, people drink coffee in European cafes, chew betel nut in Indonesian markets, nibble coca leaf on Andean mountainsides and smoke tobacco in every nation on earth.
*Mind-altering drugs have been part of virtually every human culture that has ever existed - from prehistory to the present day. They have shaped cultures, kick-started global trade, transformed our understanding of the mind, built empires and threatened the fabric of society.
*Cultural historian and writer on the psychoactive Mike Jay returned to the Bureau to tell us why
For more on Mike and his book High Society
#drugs #drugwar #opiumwars #psychoactive #opium #heroin #mescaline #lsd #cocaine #khat #betel #psychedelics #highsociety #gettinghigh #addiction #cartels
--------
1:04:00
The Underworld
“Imagination thrives in darkness”
We talk about The Undergound often at the Bureau - not London’s subterranean rail sytem, but the countercultural alternative society of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
But that is just one of the undergrounds - the underworlds - that are the subject of this episode
Dizzying ossuaries, freakish creatures of the deep sea, astounding colors of agates, lava and crystals, mind bending organic structures of mycorrhizal fungi, caverns, crevices, burrows, bunkers, burial chambers, ghistly shipwrecks, religous hellscapes and surrealist dreamscapes, natural and constructed subterranean realms and the imagined and unconscious worlds of dreams and the human psyche.
Image Alchemist Stephen Ellcock came to take us on a deep dive journey down under with his truly astonishing, visually stunning guide book Underworlds, a volume in five sections covering both the real and the imaginary, moving between continents and time periods and disciplines such as philosophy, biology, art history and literature.
We talk of how the actual physical world beneath us has fed our fears, visions and imagination – and conversely, provoked us to imagine a mythic, esoteric, mysterious underground - the afterworld of the dead, of the fairies and of the psychogical unconscious.
For more on Stephen and his amazing work
*The Bureau of Lost Culture broadcast curious, half-forgotten, countercultural stories, oral testimonies and rare tales from the underground.
*Join host Stephen Coates and a wide range of guests including musicians, artists, writers, activists and commentators in conversation.
*Listen live on Saturdays at 9.00am on London’s premier independent station Soho Radio or via all major podcast providers:
*The Bureau is now collected at The British Library Sound Archive
Brasil