Bureau of Lost Culture

She says: ‘I was reared Catholic but got over it, was born male but got over it, stopped sleeping with boys about the time I stopped being one and am much happier than I was when I was younger'. ROZ KAVENY is a poet, a novelist, a writer of science fiction, a reviewer, a cultural critic, a literary journalist and a celebrated  activist.   She has also been a sex worker - a hustler - as she would say, and has been both celebrated and denigrated. She was born a boy in 1949, became a woman all the way back in 1982 and has led a very countercultural life indeed.   This is part of her story. It's a wild and at times shocking ride. It gives an insight into what it was like to come of age as trans in an era before even being gay was legalised in the UK.   Note: contains descriptions of sexualabuse.   #trans #transgender #rozkaveney #sexchange #genderdismorphia #gender #hustlers #gendersurgery

This morning I sat in my house, took a twenty pound note from my wallet, lit a match and set the note on fire. Why? How did I feel as I watched it burn? Was it a waste, an immoral or stupid thing to do - or was it a deeply countercultural act? Jon Harris, came to the Bureau to talk about his life - as a pornographer, as a rock 'n' roll tour manager, as a bankrupt - and, most importantly, as The High Priest of The Church of Burn. We try to understand what money is, what it might be and what burning it can mean.   We hear of Jon's own history of burning money and of the rites of The Church of Burn. Of course The KLF get a mention, as does Serge Gainsbourg and Youth of Killing Joke as we explore the history of the intentional sacrificial destruction of somethign that mainstream culture seems built around and compleltey obsessed with. The Church of Burn Jon's substack ---- I have often been asked about the music that plays during the Bureau episodes. Most of it is from two albums by The Real Tuesday Weld: 'Junskshop Melodies' (which will be released in 2025) and 'Songs For Crow' which has just been released. Detaisl HERE #money #moneyburning #cash #currency #churchofburn #daisycampbell #johnhiggs #youth #killingjoke #klf #theklf #thekfoundation #sergegainsbourg   

Simon Critchley, a Professor of Philosophy and author, delves into the often-dismissed realm of mysticism. He argues that mystical experiences can enhance our understanding of life amid a rational world. The discussion spans extraordinary historical mystics, the arts' connection to the mystical, and the influence of counterculture. Critchley playfully intertwines themes of love, drugs, and the sacred nature of music, revealing how these aspects resonate deeply with human experience. His insights challenge conventional views, inviting a fresh perspective on spirituality.

Genesis P-Orridge, a groundbreaking performance artist and co-founder of Throbbing Gristle, discusses their innovative 'cut-up technique' and transformative identity exploration through extreme body modification with director David Charles Rodrigues. They delve into the impact of 1970s counterculture and the Temple of Psychic Youth, a radical musical project focused on empowerment. The conversation addresses themes of grief, love, and the poignant final days of Genesis, revealing a deeply personal journey intertwined with creativity and societal challenges.

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   #communes #counterculture #punk #radical  #utopia #alternativecommunities #intentionalcommunities #esoteric #hippie #marxist

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

*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 

“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

*In 1918, Billie Carleton, a West End actress, came off stage, went partying with friends, returned to her flat and was found dead the next morning - apparently of a cocaine overdose. A few years later, Frieda Kimpton, a dancer in Soho bars, committed suicide - with cocaine.   These events blew up into a huge media dope drama - with a cast of characters includes villians - Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a black jazz drummer  -  and victims, Billie, Frieda and the other 'Dope Girls'.    *Around them, in the Soho streets off Shaftesbury Avenue, there swirled a raffish group of seedy and entitled hedonists. Britain was horrified and fascinated, and so the drug underground and the moral panic about it, was born amid a gush of exotic tabloid detail.   *MAREK KOHN whose newly revised cult classic Dope Girls has inspired an upcoming BBC TV series, came to the Bureau to tell us how the  panic about drugs that kicked off on the 1920s (bringing in drug laws that are still with us today), was more about the fear of newly emancipated women in society and an imagined menace of foreigners bound on enslaving them, than about any damage done by the drugs themselves.   *More about Dope Girls HERE *More about Marek HERE *More about the upcoming BBC series Dope Girl   #drugs #psychedelics #cocaine #opium #morphine #druglaws #counterculture #drugculture  #drugunderground #soho #overdose #dopegirls #dope #drugunderground

In 1964 he was a working class hippie student crossing Haight Street, a road in San Francscso, when hit by a vision  - and life as he knew it was over In 1994, he was a multi-millionaire new-age entrepeneur crossing Wilshire Boulevard, a road in Los Angeles, when hit by a car - and life as he knew it was over. In the years in between, along with the co-founder of The Yippies Abbie Hoffman, counter-culture icon, anti-war activist, new age/self-help proponent, social-networking pioneer and all round troublemaker JERRY RUBIN helped articulate the voice of young America in the '60s and early '70s.   He was arrested countless times, carried out many extrardinary protests that used performance art, pranks and provocation including an attempt to levitate The Pentagon and regularly hung out with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York. Unlike Hoffman, who lived off grid for several years following a drug bust, died by suicide in 1989 and was canonized as a countercultural saint, Rubin was accused by many of “selling out" - the worst thing a 1960s radical could do - and as a consequence got written out of the hippie history books.   Well that is until our guest for this episode wrote the biography, 'Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary'   PAT THOMAS, archivist, uber re-issue producer, countercultral author and music journalist returned for the third timr to the Bureau.   Previously he was here to talk about The Black Panthers and Allen Ginsberg,and this time, he traced  Jerry Rubin's journey from high school journalist to stoned political freak and multi-millionaire entrepeneur.   Along the way, we hear about The Yippies(the Youth International Party), The Chicago 8, John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the early 70s, EST training - and selling out   And we debate the question: 'Once a revolutionary always a revolutionary?'   Pat's book:  'Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary'     Check out this Rubin related playlist   #jerryrubin #abbiehoffman #theblackpanthers #blackpower #yippies #theyippies #thebeats #allenginsberg #timothyleary #activism #socialism #revolution #levitatethepentagon #eldridgecleaver #bobdylan #nixon #johnandyoko #vietnam #anti-war #protest #johnlennon #haightashbury #thechicago8