Jim Maiden & S.B. Alger | Weaving In The Spider-Verse; RXOP, Creativity & Conspirituality
A few years back, Jim Maiden and S.B. Alger hosted a weekly livestream: RX Only Picture Show. In this episode, we're going to look at their journey as multi-skilled independent artists and obsessively spiritual conspiracy researchers, from the days before RXOP to 2022, where you can catch Jim, SB, and many others (me included) on Wednesdays and Saturday streaming our syncretic live streams-of-consciousness to the Weaving Spiders Welcome Youtube channel.
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In this episode
Core themes
From RX Only Picture Show to Weaving Spiders
S.B. Alger tells how RX Only Picture Show began: he paid Super Chats to get a flat earth debate onto Internet Bloodsports on April 1st, set up cheap gear in Jim Maiden's basement to host it, and the next week Jim had caught the bug. They committed to hitting the button every Wednesday as a variety show, with piano, guitar, juggling, yo-yo, sculpture and painting, rather than one more talk show. Weaving Spiders Welcome is framed as its spiritual successor, and the hour opens on episode 63, a weave that ran from Rasputin to Bacchus.
Tracy Twyman and the Picture Show Archive
S.B. recalls how he and Jim paid for occult author Tracy Twyman's paywalled research and chased her for an interview, only for her to stay on as a third co-host from roughly episode 25 to 65. She would often arrive minutes before a show with research from the night before and take it over, the first time the public heard it. Chance plays a clip from episode 33, where Jim sculpted, S.B. painted and Tracy read aloud. S.B. gives listeners tacit permission to download and reupload the archive, and calls giving Tracy that outlet a blessing.
Creativity as a Spiritual Path
Chance argues that conspiracy researchers leave spirituality out, while many spiritual people lose its foundation, a personal creative path. S.B. adds that most people are handed a spirituality by birthplace and family, and that creativity runs constantly, even against you, until you become conscious of it and guide it into making something. Jim recalls his father asking him, at eight, to list every way to get water into the house, a lesson that there is always a better solution. Chance says creativity became vital to him in his early twenties.
Bronze, Apprenticeship and Flow State
Jim grew up in his family's art business, where his mother poured wax while he was in the womb, and he describes rebuilding a life-size bronze coyote whose remolded copies drift like a game of telephone. S.B. thanks Jim and his family for hiring him, which he says relit the artist in him, and calls Jim the master, himself the apprentice, and Jim's father the master above both. Jim says Flow State grew from a college class called Sculpt and Listen, and S.B. hopes viewers treat it as an invitation to make their own art.
Secret Orders, Morality and Control
S.B. describes a translation of the Secret Statutes of the Templars as, in his view, evidence of an inner circle sharing signs, symbols and handshakes across languages, and he sees a trinity in every archetypal religion. Chance calls all the cults one cult with different packaging and argues that morality is ordained by the voice within rather than by men, warning that skipping that step leads toward ascension cults. S.B., paraphrasing Christopher Knowles, suggests today's heirs of old power lack their predecessors' knowledge, and says he believes an aeon is changing.
Quotes
“We just made a 10 out of 10 commitment to each other that every Wednesday we were going to hit the button, whether we were ready or not.”
“So many people that bring spirituality in lose what I think is the foundation of spirituality, which is your own personal creative path in pursuit.”
“There's always better solutions to a problem, and you always want to be looking at the problems and trying to find more creative answers.”
“Most people get told they're supposed to have a certain spirituality based on where they were born and what year and what kind of religious family they come from.”
“If you mold the original, the copies from the mold look just like the original, but after time the mold kind of stretches out and shrinks in spots.”
“These guys are successful and pulling it off in a big way. There's really no reason except for my own fear and insecurity not to pursue it and see what happens.”
“When you're in the group with that collective consciousness stream going, somehow it brings the right links and the right connections to you faster and more serendipitously.”
“Time just disappeared. It was so entertaining and so much fun, you don't even think about what you're doing. It wasn't like work at all.”
“You see the sweetest, simplest meme. It's not compiled out of a whole bunch of parts, it's just a few words in an image and it just lands, and it's hilarious.”
“It's not that there is no morality, it's that morality isn't ordained by men. It's ordained by the voice within.”
“I hope people know that who watch the flow state, it's not just to be witness to us doing it. It's an encouragement to make art.”
Jim Maiden is an independent artist and spiritual researcher who co-created the "RX Only Picture Show" livestream and later "Weaving Spiders Welcome" with S.B. Alger, exploring syncretic and conspiratorial spiritual themes.
See all Jim episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
