Bureau of Lost Culture

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.

For more on James and his work
 
To see our gallery of the top ten images that changed the Counterculture, go HERE
 

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Stephen

 

Photo: Malcolm Browne

Roc Sanford is a British writer, artist and climate activist whose life has been a countercultural journey from an alternative childhood through academia to a remarkable experiment in off-grid living and ecological resistance as a catalyser for Extinction Rebellion and Ocean Rebellion.
 
For more than three decades he has been associated with the remote Hebridean island of Gometra, where he lives much of the year without mains electricity, running water or many of the conveniences of modern life. 
 
Roc was born to parents who deliberately turned away from wealth and privilege and chose to live closer to the working-class world they wanted to understand and write about. Amongst other works, his mother Nell Dunn was the author of Poor Cow and Up the Junction, and his father Jeremy Sanford was the author of Cathy Come Home, all made into groundbreaking hugely influential British New Wave films by Ken Loach in the 60s.
 
Their life choices carried Roc from Belgravia, to Chelsea to Battersea, and then to a remote valley in Wales where the family lived a very alternative life.
 
We hear about that and get into the tensions that can emerge when idealism meets reality.  We hear about Roc's unusual schooling, his years during the AIDs crisis in New York, studyomg the ideas that shaped his thinking about perception, systems, and the way we interpret the world.
 
And we head to Soho, meet Francis Bacon and Genesis P Orridge again, and hear about his first brush with British law.
 
Roc has led - is leading  - a big countercultural life - so this is the first part of a double-header conversation. 
 
More on Roc, his work and life
 

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Hello!
 
If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE
 
Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  
 
Stephen

We are joined by oral historian and broadcaster Alan Dein.

We discuss the history, culture and technology of the coin-operated machines that allowed ordinary people to make a record of themselves in the West (and, in adapted bootlegged form, to create records of forbidden music in the Soviet Union) long before the advent of tape or digital recording.

We hear a selection of extraordinary recordings of strange, moving voices from Alan’s collection and learn how the records were used to send messages home from the war, record visits to tourist destinations or to capture the sounds of loved ones in a way that had never been possible before.

For More on X-Ray Audio

www.x-rayaudio.com

For More on Bureau of Lost Culture

www.bureauoflostculture.com

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  

Stephen

BILLY BRAGG pays a visit to the Bureau to lead us on an extraordinary whirlwind tour through the music that the counterculture forgot.
 
Along the way we hear about the emergence of The Teenager in post-war Britain, the massive impact of Rock Around the Clock, the Soho espresso bar culture of the 50s and the birth of British youth culture.
 
We explore why Skiffle, which soundtracked that youth culture for a few intense years and was the inspiration for musicians in The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, The Who and The Rolling Stones, has been oddly forgotten.  And Billy explains why, as the first British DIY musical revolution, Skiffle provided the template for the Punk movement of the 70s that was to inspire him.
 
Along the way, we get educated about the post war 'trad jazz' movement, the cultural stranglehold of the BBC - and the terrific transformatory power of a guy - or a girl - with a guitar.
 
For more on Billy and his book Roots, Radicals and Rockers:
https://www.billybragg.co.uk/product/roots-radicals-and-rockers-how-skiffle-changed-the-world-hardback-signed-by-billy/
 
Billy's Top Five Skiffle Tunes
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZtMpev7GhPIi-e2ajPxUd_FVyUQxMBbB
 

For more on the Bureau of Lost Culture
www.bureauoflostculture.com 

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If you can contribute to this crazy endeavour, join our Patreon HERE

Thank you to everyone who’s signed up to support the show —that means a lot. We have chosen not to carry ads here; it simply wouldn’t sit right with the spirit of the Bureau. But that does mean we can benefit from your support, in whatever form that takes, not just financial.  

Stephen

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.

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