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A show about Weird Stuff, hosted by AP Strange. AP interviews cool weirdos about their work, and invites friends on to discuss second sequels in franchises in a series called "Third Time's the Charm". Other fun surprises await...
Pardon me while I have a strange interlude. But there is nothing else. Life is an obscure oboe bumming a ride on the omnibus of art. Among the misty corridors of pine, and in those corridors I see figures, strange figures. Welcome back, my friends, to the AP Strange Show.
AP Strange:I am your host, AP Strange. This is my show. Tonight's show is brought to you by Breton's exquisite corpse display cases. Just so you can display your exquisite corpses in style, they come in the rotating variety, but they also just just come in the regular stationary exquisite quartz display case variety so that you can drink the new wine and appreciate your exquisite corpse in style. Tonight on the show we're gonna be talking exquisite corpses I bet at some point but we're also generally talking art and weird and paranormal stuff and this is a conversation I've been wanting to have for quite a while And I'm glad that I got tonight's guest Jay Shank on for it.
AP Strange:I've known him for quite a while. He was one of the organizers and hosts of Panparacon online conference some number of years ago that was happy to present at. And I've known him on and off online through Liminal Earth Group and a whole bunch of other stuff. And he's just a cool and really well spoken knowledgeable guy about lots of things, but particularly art, magic, and the weird. So thrilled to have him on.
AP Strange:So welcome to the show, Jay. How are doing?
Jay Shenk:Hey, I'm great. Thank you for having me on. I've been wanting to come on for a while and talk about this stuff too, just because it's so fascinating, but with a buildup like that, I really hope it does come off as knowledgeable and interesting.
AP Strange:Well, I think you are, because I mean, I kinda threw it out there and I left it really loose. I'm like, let's talk about our weirdness. And we kind of vaguely planned months ago to do it. I just kinda returned to it. But you sent me an outline of basic things that you'd wanna cover.
AP Strange:And I'm like, man, all of that sounds great. Like some of that, I don't even, I'm not even sure I know about. So this is gonna be really cool.
Jay Shenk:It's, we could talk, we could start talking about it. I think the writ large for this, the unifying force on a lot of what I have to talk about is the theosophists. And just the presence of Theosophy and the extent to which it was a really legitimately popular religion around the turn of the century and into the early twentieth century. It's funny today because theosophy still exists, you can still join the Theosophical Society, but it's just like people are aware of what an influential force it was for artists and thinkers, you know, from the late 1800s through the through the 20s, maybe into the 30s a little bit.
AP Strange:And
Jay Shenk:while there's a lot to talk about on this, and I'm probably going to bounce around where I land most, where I like to talk about this and where it really gets interesting is talking about the surrealists. Yeah. So I think most people are familiar with the surrealists. You've seen some of the work of some of the famous guys like everybody's seen Dolly. A lot of people know Rene Magritte.
Jay Shenk:But the actual nuts and bolts of how we got surrealism is really interesting to me and the occult influence on that and the paranormal and the supernatural influence is something. Because you have World War I, right? World War I, terrible terrible war, terrible conflict, completely destroys the European order, completely destroys kind of the the Victorian era and like the principles of rationality and the the like the the idea that there was this social glue of, you know, religiosity and moral principles and king and country and all of these things that were this framework holding European society together completely crumbles. And this really has like a profound effect on a lot of people kind of grappling with this and coming to terms with this where you see first the Dadaists rise out of the Cabaret Society and really wanting to some extent, crudest way to put it is really giving the bird to the mores and the cultural stylistic values of the day and saying like, all this was terrible, all this failed, all we need to tear all this down. Then Oh, was
AP Strange:like the punk rock of its time.
Jay Shenk:Was, it very punk rock, very much just anti establishment. And then you go into the earliest surrealists with you mentioned, the sponsor Andre Breton and the surrealists, and they are really trying to piece together a new way of thought and a new way of seeing reality.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah, see, I like to impress this upon people because surrealism, I was so into it when I was younger, and I feel like it informed a lot of my magical thinking. And then over the years, I'm just like, wait, no, this stuff is intertwined anyway. Right,
Jay Shenk:and that's even when I first started reading about this, I'd like, even before I delved into it, I'm like, this is magical practice. Is the same whether you believe in the literalism of magic or the psych even, or just believe in its psychological effects, it's still magic. It's still like, we're trying to do magic. We're trying to combine what is the quote, they were going to combine the waking world and the dream world into a super reality.
AP Strange:That's there was where surrealism comes from is super reality and if you read, I think you're quoting from the original Surrealist Manifesto Yes. Yeah, and if you read that, you're like, this is really metaphysical and it's actually a magical manifesto. This is actually changing the landscape of reality vis a vis our perception of it, but also like literally. They literally meant that we're expanding what's possible.
Jay Shenk:It's fascinating, and I will tell you having done several art degrees, you don't get that in your art history class. Even when you're doing it. It's like, okay, we gotta do, we're doing history of modern. They're not talking about that. So the kind of bear, I feel like they're kind of burying the lead on that, but I feel like right at that time, I don't know, I become really interested in the turn of the century from like the late 1880s through the 20s, just at the amount of change that society went through, but also in a weird way that there was a real side by side belief in the supernatural and the paranormal, while we're also having all of these modern wonders that kind of are shaping even the world that we live in in the twenty first century are coming together.
Jay Shenk:The practice of spiritualism, really took off after the civil war in America, people hoping to contact their deceased relatives on the other side, got another shot in the arm after the first world war. Right. So you have the same thing. But what's interesting on the media theory side of this is the telegraph, which was also kind of came into prevalence in the civil war was seen as supporting spiritualism. That this was almost a proof that you have this invisible form of communication that spans great distances.
Jay Shenk:Why can't we span from this world into the next? And you move that into the 20s where radio starts to take off. And that's the same thing. There's a really good book, Haunted Media by Jeffrey Scott's.
AP Strange:Yeah, I've heard of good things.
Jay Shenk:Haven't read that. That's worth the time. To the audience, to everyone, that's worth the time. Scott's is a rationalist, but he does an excellent job discussing the history of all these things. And so you have, again, radio makes people believe more in the supernatural.
Jay Shenk:Even though this is a scientific thing, it's still the mysterious voices in the ether, mysterious voice in the air. There was even Nikola Tesla thought he was hearing voices from outer space.
AP Strange:Yeah, Mars specifically.
Jay Shenk:Mars specifically, I think the explanation today is that he was hearing natural radio waves that we pick up from radio telescopes like Arecibo and stuff. But it was this kind of to me like this charged atmosphere. You have the theosophists who are really bringing in the Eastern religious practices and mystical practices and popularizing those in the West. And all of this stuff is happening you know, hand in glove. Another kind of niche interest of mine that is still practiced today, but nobody really talks.
Jay Shenk:It's not big in weirdo circles. The idea of radionics was
AP Strange:Yeah, I saw your note about this, but I was like, wait, I'm not sure I know what that is. So please us fill that out for us.
Jay Shenk:Radionics is the idea essentially of scientifically detecting and manipulating these unseen energy forces. And these are things that would be analogous in religious sense to like prana or ki or these type of energies that are associated, again, with Eastern religions, but in the West, have a couple people who say they can detect these things and they called it eloptic energy is one form of it. And they were creating these machines again that were. This is in the air of electricity. So you're plugging in this machine, but you're manipulating these settings to create this effect.
Jay Shenk:For the practitioner, it was a healing effect. The first person that really popularized this was trying to be a doctor. Aldis Huxley was a devotee of this.
AP Strange:Okay.
Jay Shenk:And obviously today it's treated as quackery or it's treated as a pseudo scientific thing. Although it also had a recharge, this where I bounced back and forth. It kind of had another shot in the arm in the 50s with the Hieronymus device. Don't know if you've heard of that. There's an inventor with the fantastic name of Galen T.
Jay Shenk:Hieronymus.
AP Strange:It is a great name.
Jay Shenk:It is, right? I wish I was a Galen T. Hieronymus, but he invented this device that was a material analyzer. And in testing it, he sent it off, this is God, when you start getting into this stuff, everything is connected. He sent it off to one of the guys that used to write for what?
Jay Shenk:This is my brain is dying. Who published the shaver mysteries?
AP Strange:Ray Palmer.
Jay Shenk:Right. It was one of the guys that wrote for Ray Palmer's things. And the guy that this author and this is, again, I should have this is where I'm a little bit I'm unprepared on this.
AP Strange:Was it Curtis Fuller, maybe?
Jay Shenk:Maybe. I will I have to look this up. If you do show notes, I'll have it ready for the show notes. Alright. Basically saying, like, you don't need your machine.
Jay Shenk:You don't need to plug this in. I drew it out on a piece of paper and followed the same kind of, it's like a touch sensing thing where you move the dial until you feel feedback and you move your fingers over a touch plate until you feel friction. He's like, this is magic. Created, you've stumbled onto some form of magic, which we will circle all the way back to this at some point in this conversation. This is what we've talked about.
Jay Shenk:The paper I wrote on this, this is where I bring it all back in, but you need this highly charged atmosphere where these Frenchmen are deciding we need to magically recreate reality. And they use some of these techniques like Breton and the before we get to, I know we always think of the surrealist painters that are surrealist authors. They use
AP Strange:poets originally. I mean, Breton was more of a poet. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And they used automatic writing.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:As part of their technique derived directly from the spiritualist practice of the time. Yep. A lot of the notions that were coming, people being exposed to you through theosophy, particularly the idea of projecting one's thoughts outside the body. We have that infamous story with the Tulpa. We created the Tulpa and then it has to be destroyed.
Jay Shenk:But the notion that that's possible, it was highly influential to the thinking on this. And you get, this is an interesting book. You get C. W. Ledbetter, writing two books, Man Visible, Invisible, and Thought Forms.
Jay Shenk:A Man Visible and Invisible is about seeing the aura, seeing this energy field and the thought forms are him literally saying with concentration, I'm applying my theosophistic principles to meditation and focus. I can see shapes that are representative of the thoughts of somebody.
AP Strange:The thought forms was co written with Annie Bissant, right?
Jay Shenk:That's right.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah,
Jay Shenk:Ledbetter is-
AP Strange:We're talking second generation Theosophy here this where is post Blavatsky, she's been dead for like twenty years at this point, so yeah.
Jay Shenk:That's true. It's, I think-
AP Strange:Just for clarity.
Jay Shenk:Just for clarity, yeah. This is less about the seventh race of, more about practice than it is about her lineage and hyperborea stuff. But the idea again that that came through that in the the idea of abstraction that you could represent thought with abstraction is really that that notion begins in art by being exposed to the idea from from thought forms. And people start painting with that.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And it's really interesting. So you have a little earlier you have Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian. Arguably if he's a surrealist or not, he was contemporary.
AP Strange:Right. I think most people would consider him abstract, but
Jay Shenk:Yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:You know, writing concerning the spiritual and art, which is a book where he really tries to lay down, I don't want to say hard instructions, but kind of as to, you know, you draw these shapes in these colors and it is representative of the spiritual truth. And if you use my system, we can create works of art that are inherently conveying spiritual truth through this language to the viewer. Right. Didn't take off, but still the ideas are there. And everybody, I mean, groups of people have their own approach.
Jay Shenk:Some tend towards some of the surrealists end up going towards abstractions. Some end up sticking with a more I say like McGritt and Dali were like the realists, surrealists doing stuff that's represented.
AP Strange:Some would argue more commercial surrealists as well. They're very good at capitalizing on
Jay Shenk:it. Think, man, at the end of the day, that's one of those things that if we talk about it long enough, I'll become gnostic. At the end of the day, victims of a material universe, you gotta eat and you gotta sell a painting if you want it too, if you wanna eat. And that's just unfortunately, were we to exist only in the realm of pure thought, maybe we could get away with being a little less commercial. Well, Dolly was the worst.
Jay Shenk:Like as a person, Terrell would have been being ruthlessly aggressively self promoted. Know, his work really had, as the kids would say, he fell off pretty heavily at the end. Like the later era stuff is really just like he was churning it out. Yeah. And just really hoping it would just be like, hey, it's a dolly, buy it.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:That's really a thing. But it's interesting how that stuff bounces around into the later era of abstraction. We're talking about some of those painters that came up in the 50s and 60s were influenced by these guys starting this out. Even still, there's an influence Kandinsky in and Saul LeWitt. There is really some kind of like not literal supernatural influence, but there is a real heavy, like the painting as a portal to another frame of consciousness.
Jay Shenk:We don't mean it necessarily magically. We just want you to think about it that way.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Kind of stuff, but it is interesting to map out all the connections to me. On this. Because you bounce back again, there was a group of, again, the surrealists were also influenced by Eliphas Levi, who was writing in the later half of the 1800s, again bringing a newer take on hermeticism to authors. He had his own take on a lot of the classical magic doctrine that ended up influencing people, because it was a little more loose. He was talking about being filled with, like, the astral light of God and channeling that out into your workings.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, more so. And that, you know, there's a meta theme of this like of energy and this abstract energy flowing into and through the art as well as through the science of the day. That's really interesting. And those things like keep intersecting at that time. Of course, arguably you didn't really necessarily, they didn't really manage to create a whole new reality, unfortunately.
AP Strange:Oh, maybe they did.
Jay Shenk:Maybe they did. I think they gave us, I think they gave you the keys to do it if you wanna go down path. Because the guy, a couple people, one artist in particular, I think about, somebody that you introduced me to is Doc Shields.
AP Strange:Yeah, Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Because doc I feel like Doc Shields was about that life.
AP Strange:Yeah. He lived it. So everything he did was art. All the cryptozoology stuff, all the magic stuff was all art to him, you know? So
Jay Shenk:And it was. And he was that guy that blurred the lines between, you know, he was an artist and he was a stage magician, that he was also a real magician.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And he was really irreverent about his practice and stuff. Kind of never let you really know where he stood on it.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:But that's what made him, that's what made it work.
AP Strange:Yeah, if you read his book, Monstrum, A Wizard's Tale, I don't know if you ever read that one.
Jay Shenk:I have that, I did read that, yes.
AP Strange:Fantastic, yeah, because he gets into Max Ernst.
Jay Shenk:Right.
AP Strange:And Max Ernst's like totem character, the weird bird creature that I forget the name escapes me.
Jay Shenk:Oh, it's right on the tip of my tongue too. Wop Wop Wop. Yes.
AP Strange:Yeah. And like the kind of weird material reality that Wap, Wap had to Ernst outside of the art, maybe he wouldn't have admitted to so much. Right.
Jay Shenk:Well, that comes back, I feel like that brings me into like the other thing. I feel like everything comes back to the Trickster and the Paranormal, which is probably the most informative book I've read on that because you talk about like the taint of the supernatural and that you can't really tell people that you have like, oh yeah, have a totem that materializes and follows me around. You end up like Peter Sellers. People are gonna put you away because you're seeing Harvey the rabbit.
AP Strange:Right,
Jay Shenk:right. You know, that's like, that's how, so you're like, yeah, probably should keep that to myself. But with the surrealists, they were looking for that. I mean, a lot of the other things that informed them were quote unquote primitive societies. I don't believe in the label of primitive tribal societies that are, we're saying people that are tribal and animist.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:And that those folks do, and this is talked about in Trickster and the Paranormal, live in that continuous reality. Like there's no, for like the Australian Aborigines, there's no real separation between the world and the dream time. Lot of these things like the supernatural is a lived reality that is accepted and part of their lives. And, you know, I was thinking about this earlier today, you go to a museum, usually natural history, you'll see shamanic masks.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:But it's like, we say, oh, these are the art of these people that those were also tools to access that super reality. You know, not, and this is what I think the difference is, is not everyone can do that in a tribal society. You know, the the shaman is called and initiated and there's a whole sort of doctrine on that.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:Like, this is how it goes. And I I think the surrealists were trying very hard to self initiate and get something
AP Strange:back. Right, or yeah, it almost hand you a pair of sunglasses through which you can have a different view of reality that puts a different spin on everything that you're looking at because much like a shaman, like the mask is the spirit that you're inhabiting when you do the dance around the fire or whatever, know, when you're that shaman character. Because I mean, surrealism, the key to it is that every singular object has a multiplicity of meaning that changes based on the perspective of who's looking at it. And it literally becomes the thing that it represents as well. If you can get your head around that, you mentioned being gnostic, that's kind of a gnostic take as well, or a neoplatonist one anyway, where you're looking at forms and shapes and meanings that are imbued through it, which is like being able to poke your head into the super reality for a second, see the hidden connections between things.
AP Strange:It's mystical.
Jay Shenk:It's mystical. I think the two things, the two tools that I like for that, I like the chaos magic approach, where I'm going to adopt beliefs and practices ad hoc is needed to accomplish whatever I'm trying to accomplish. And that really lets you see the forum the way you need to see it right in the now. Mhmm. The second.
Jay Shenk:And the other one this is from another book. This is from Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Revealed. By Ramsey Dukes. Have you read that one?
AP Strange:No, I've heard of it. Ramsey Dukes is great though.
Jay Shenk:Dukes is great. I mean, this is for the very young in the audience. This would be considered like a proto clickbait title. It has nothing to do with sex.
AP Strange:He has a great sense of humor.
Jay Shenk:Yes. There's no black magic. But he talks he has this quadrant. Kind of like, you know, the you see, like the political quadrant where he's got religion, science, magic and art broken down. And then there's overlap.
Jay Shenk:So like there's intuition, thinking, sensation and feelings. So art is a feeling and intuition. Magic is a feeling and sensation. Science is a sensation and thinking. Religion is an intuition and thinking.
Jay Shenk:I try. He talks a lot about thinking like a magician.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And I think it's really good to kind of have that as a mental toolbox where I am going, I need to think like a magician now. Don't need to necessarily think I had to fix the toilet this weekend. I don't need to think like I'm a magician then at least to start out with. By the third hardware trip, the third trip to the hardware store, I'm like ready to ready to seek guidance and assistance from
AP Strange:Yeah, the petition the gods.
Jay Shenk:Petitioning the gods, imbuing my wrenches with great important, you know, imports. Like wield, I wield this crescent wrench like Excalibur now to smite the dragon of these tank bolts that won't come off. Yeah. So, you know, but that's the thing. It's with one task, I'm starting out in a rational scientific way.
Jay Shenk:And then depending, you know, it's just like, well, let's talk about how it goes. And it just goes to, yes, we need to petition unseen forces to get this done.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah, and I feel like a lot of people get there when they're desperate and find that they get results when they turn to an unseen force and an unseen supernatural force in the funniest ways. Like it can happen in really unexpected and funny ways, you know? And unabashedly just claiming it, I think like claiming it, the act of claiming it helps. Like at a certain point, I just started unabashedly calling myself a wizard and I don't care what people think about that.
AP Strange:That's how you become
Jay Shenk:a wizard though. That's again, I've tried to do that. You've heard of New York wizard, the person is awake guy?
AP Strange:Yeah, oh yeah.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, that's kind of how he did it. Now he did a lot of drugs too, but he did a lot of drugs and said he was a wizard and became a wizard that way.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:And I think, yeah, I think the key is to me is to be able to switch into wizard mode when you're not under stress. You're not trying to torque a bolt off. It helps then, but you can do it out of your own before that. You can try No. To
AP Strange:I'm a wizard twenty four seven.
Jay Shenk:So Yeah. That's no. That's that's good. And I do feel like a lot of the things I I learned because I'm not going to be initiated. Like, I'm not having, like, the call, but you can just I feel like with the surrealist and reading about Doc Shields, you can kind of get there yourself if you decide to get there.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:But do think some people are called. I do think Howard Finster, good example.
AP Strange:I
Jay Shenk:think a lot of outsider artists are called. For the folks that don't know Howard Finster, Howard Finster was what they call an outsider artist, which means somebody that didn't go to art school. He did not receive formal training and he was not part of the gallery critic industrial complex that propels and drives the art world. He was a guy that was possessed of a, I think a degree of religious, I don't want to say mania, but religiosity that most of us don't feel. And he was just compelled to paint all the time.
Jay Shenk:He felt like he was delivering the Lord's message and the Lord was moving through him.
AP Strange:And
Jay Shenk:he did His stuff again has a surreal element to it because it's really primitive pictures of people, but there's angels flying around and there's biblical verses, but there's also UFOs.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:And shooting stars at a bunch of other really strange stuff.
AP Strange:Yeah. And he kind of fits in like scripture and texts like in the margins or in parts of the picture and stuff like that too.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. And I I feel like I feel like Howard was just dialed into it. I don't think he needed. Just he he was one of those people that was just had it intuitively to a higher degree.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:That's
AP Strange:Like a mystical savant.
Jay Shenk:Mystical, exactly. He was a mystical savant to the degree where he saw the ghost develops.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. So what would we
AP Strange:Yeah, you gotta talk about this.
Jay Shenk:Okay. So when we, I worked through the great recession, I was a security guard at the Akron Art Museum and one of the big shows we had at the time was Howard Finster. At, this was before show open because I was just up in the gallery, mostly by myself to keep people out before they were supposed to be in there. And the collector and curator of the show was up there and I didn't even really know who that was. I just was like, hey, and talking to this guy and he started, he's like, oh yeah.
Jay Shenk:And he knew Howard, he got a lot of stuff from him when he was alive and talked to him. And he was talking about Howard being out, he's working on Paradise Gardens, which, in addition to being a painter, he tried to build heaven on earth. It's called Paradise Gardens. It's, he was also kind of a, he was a sculptor. Think the only training he had outside of being a preacher was being a woodworker.
Jay Shenk:So he did know how to build some stuff.
AP Strange:Where was this? Was this in Ohio?
Jay Shenk:No, no. This, I mean, it's in Ohio. Paradise Gardens is down south. He is a southerner. I think Paradise Gardens still exists and you can go there.
Jay Shenk:But yeah, Paradise Gardens is in Georgia, in Somerville, Georgia. And yes, it is still, I just looked it up. You can still go there. At some point, we all must make a pilgrimage to Paradise Gardens. And he's out there working in Paradise Gardens and Elvis appears before him.
AP Strange:Just
Jay Shenk:he's right there. And this is Howard, Okay, Elvis is like Howard, I have something important to tell you. And Howard is just like, all right, hold on a second, turns around for some reason and he turns back to the kid and he's like, all right, he's gone. And I was just I like, you gotta when the king shows up and says he's got something important to tell you, just listen.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:Don't tell him, wait a minute. Don't don't be like, oh, woah. I I don't know. I only get a notebook, you know? Like Right.
Jay Shenk:Right.
AP Strange:Focus. Write this down. Yeah. Yeah. The thing doesn't wait for anybody.
AP Strange:You know?
Jay Shenk:No. He doesn't.
AP Strange:He's got business to take care of.
Jay Shenk:He does. He's like, Howard, these are idiots. He's just like, I don't have time for this. I am going to I just gotta, I gotta move on with this. So, and I, I guess he never came back.
Jay Shenk:I was really hoping, was like, did he come back? Did did Elvis ever be like, okay, I took care of across the cosmos, Check this off my to do list. Now I can I guess I can go back and try to get Howard's attention again? But at some point, there's another great but little known weirdo guy, fellow by the name of EJ Gold.
AP Strange:He's Wait. Wait. Wait. I don't wanna get off Finster.
Jay Shenk:I don't wanna get Finster. Okay. We're gonna talk about Elvis though. I would we'll get back to this, but okay. Talk about talk about yes.
Jay Shenk:At Howard just The only thing though that I also know about Howard that kind of does make me feel like he does have a connection with surrealists that it's entirely unintentional because a lot of those folks were great imbibers of alcohol and drugs. Howard was teetotal, but Howard what would take handfuls of Folgers crystals and just eat them. Keep going, to keep his energy up and to keep painting. And he was just wired on caffeine.
AP Strange:Coke, I think you also told me at one point that he was in not very well ventilated areas with Yeah,
Jay Shenk:I realized that. I did realize that being a rural American, a lot of what Howard uses in medium, he didn't use oils, used tractor enamel.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And I'm like, yeah, so Howard was definitely fuming himself out the acetone much like the shamans ingesting the psychedelic plants or the libertine surrealists drinking their absinthe, Howard was ripped to the gills on acetone fumes and caffeine, at least some of the time. Helped him pick up those radio signals from beyond a little bit.
AP Strange:Right. And the light of God.
Jay Shenk:The light of God. Channeling that light
AP Strange:of God. Yeah. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And Howard Howard would have liked Eliphis Levi because he was a wizard but he would have said he was channeling the light of God and all his work. So.
AP Strange:Right. There you go. So how was Finster discovered though? Who found him if he was, know, being an outsider?
Jay Shenk:Howard ended up getting discovered by a couple of these art collectors. And Howard, he was doing this stuff and he was giving it away. And just on a trip, somebody found out about this. And then he got famous to the point where he did did that Talking Heads album cover. Did the REM album cover.
Jay Shenk:He was on The Tonight Show with when when Johnny Carson was still hosting The Tonight Show.
AP Strange:Oh, I didn't know about that.
Jay Shenk:Howard, no, this was another one. This was an ongoing little conflict with some of the museum staff. We had Howard's part of Howard's Johnny Carson impression on a loop and Howard does a little dance like he does a jig on Carson. And it was they, the staff that were in charge of the exhibits would turn that up super loud. And then you'd hear Howard doing his jig on Carson, like echoing, and we would turn it back down.
Jay Shenk:I really, this was kind of before pre flash mob, pre big social media. It's like everybody, all the guards, I was like, we all gotta get downstairs in the main lobby and do the Howard jig before this goes off. We never manage to coordinate that, it was like, yeah, we're all gonna do the Howard jig.
AP Strange:Yeah, I'll take that up.
Jay Shenk:No, it's good. And his family is still making, he ended up, he got so popular with selling so many prints and so many things that he enlisted the extended family as kind of his own little art factory. And for a while there, they were still making his stuff. And I think some of it is still out there.
AP Strange:Did he get paid well for doing rock album covers or did he
Jay Shenk:feel I like think a he did all right for that. He did, this is kind of the, you know, how it goes is you you get discovered by the gallerist and the collectors and you can finally start making some money even though, you know, they're gonna they're gonna take a cut of that. But, yeah, there's there's there's still some stuff for sale of his even on the website. Yeah. Prince and stuff.
AP Strange:Well, I only ask because. Yeah. You know, there are those album cover artists that famously got burned. They got like a little bit of money for like a one down payment. That's it, you know?
Jay Shenk:I think Howard, I think Howard did alright. You can actually, oh, this is, here's another one. I have a vacation planned for you. You can go stay at Vision House where God came to Howard and told him to paint.
AP Strange:Okay.
Jay Shenk:That's a thing, you can book that.
AP Strange:Yeah. If god has any words for me, that'd be nice. Yeah. Can go there find out.
Jay Shenk:Or Elvis. Or Elvis. They could just be like, AP, we love the show. That's it. You know, you might just get it might be very simple.
AP Strange:That'd be fine, you know.
Jay Shenk:I want to ask Elvis about it, and this is where I was going to make that digression. There's another weirdo, lesser known guy, EJ Gold. I like this guy a lot. Thinks you can, He's kind of picking up on the Tesla note before, he thinks you can communicate with other dimensions with crystal radio. And he also makes, he's hired a guy to make, I don't wanna call them games even though they use game engines, but one of them is a seance with Elvis.
Jay Shenk:And I got this, it's like, it was like $7. So I am gonna try to do the with Elvis and ask him what he had to tell Howard and see if he'll talk to me through the EJ Gold app.
AP Strange:So it's an app that you
Jay Shenk:can get? It runs on a Windows computer, yeah.
AP Strange:Wow.
Jay Shenk:It's not a phone app, but yeah, it's like you can download a Sianz with Elvis.
AP Strange:So it doesn't work on Mac. Is there a Mac version?
Jay Shenk:I don't either might be. I have to look. I have to
AP Strange:look. Alright. Let
Jay Shenk:me see.
AP Strange:I don't know. I wish you do this. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:You you you need to get I feel I I should have told you about this much earlier, but you can you can get out on a seance. Maybe you can have Elvis on the show. I don't know. EJ is pretty honest. He's like, I don't know if you'll get him or not.
Jay Shenk:We're calling him. I don't know if he'll get up.
AP Strange:Alright. So. You described him as a weirdo. What else is he known for? Like an artist too?
Jay Shenk:He's an artist too. He is an artist. He wrote the American Book of the Dead. It kind of again with this whole continuity of Tibetan spirituality.
AP Strange:Okay, okay. He was
Jay Shenk:a sixties hippie.
AP Strange:Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Jay Shenk:Does a lot of his art kind of tied in with the radionic stuff we've about. Viewing, he's an invisible energy guy. Yeah, he's around. He's still alive. He's a pretty old guy now.
Jay Shenk:He's still blogging, but It's an interesting little digression, but it might be worth it to try talk to Elvis.
AP Strange:Okay, well I did have the one encounter with Elvis in a meditative trance at one point. It was actually fairly similar to Howard's encounter, because I don't remember what he said. He said something to me and I could not remember it later.
Jay Shenk:The wisdom of the king will be revealed in due time. It'll be there when you need it.
AP Strange:Oh yeah, Exactly. It's
Jay Shenk:just there. But tying into that, when I was doing research on this, I took a course at the Ryan called Art as Art as Psy, I said that very quickly. They still offer it, although it is different now than when I took it. I took this like in 02/2002. And I ended up doing the paper I wrote was a research on this, tying this into radionics and dowsing again, because the idea with I think there's two schools of thought on dowsing.
Jay Shenk:One is that it's coming, you're channeling it from within, one is that you're receiving it from without. But, and this applies to Howard in his process too. A lot of these outsider artists who were just motivated to do this. I think the creative impulse, the creative process when you're going through something and making your decisions is akin to dowsing.
AP Strange:Think you
Jay Shenk:are, at least for me in visual art, And I actually realized this when you were doing your talk, I did that poster for you.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:Monsters.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. UFOs and bug eyed monsters. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Yes. Okay. I couldn't tell you why I did what I did. I sat down and was kind of that was all software based and just just went. And I feel there are those points and I feel there's more to it.
Jay Shenk:I think there is you take the human capacity for symbolic thought, which is really what differentiates us from a lot of creatures with a couple exceptions in the animal kingdom. Are psychological rules of perception that were investigated and studied by Rudolf Arnheim. This is the beginning of gestalt psychology.
AP Strange:Yeah, yep.
Jay Shenk:I don't know if you're too familiar with gestalt.
AP Strange:Only vaguely. Never read
Jay Shenk:it The most to basic, basic element of gestalt is that this is our brains associate things. That really, you put these two things together on a thing, if I move them close together, they become a group. If I move them far apart, they're no longer a group. That is a psychological, I don't want to say decision, but that is a psychological mechanism that decides that. Yeah, when you think about it objectively, there there's nothing to say that even two objects on a plane are close together, they're a group, but we decide that.
Jay Shenk:And there's a lot of it was it was very it's something that is operated in the human mind for millennia without being studied very, very deeply unconscious. And you take that, you take these things, these symbolic thought and the Gestalt psychology that is, these are built into our minds. Every human has this. And then you're just making your decisions kind of like you're searching, like they say, like searching for water. I'm searching for the right decision.
Jay Shenk:I'm searching for the right image or the right combination of things. I know it when I see it, which is what And I realized this in doing Now I'm on my third studio art degree. I did a bachelor's in fine art, bachelor's in graphic design, doing my master's in digital. Right now, you can teach process in terms of this is how you run software or this is how you render with a pencil or render with paint. But to actually get good at art, just have to do it and hone it.
Jay Shenk:You'll get a like, oh, it's the Malcolm Gladwell ten thousand hours thing, which I think is kind of hokum. It's like, what are you honing? You're honing your intuition. You're honing that ability to dial in to whatever this is that's helping you decide that what you're doing is right. And I think think guys like Finster, think a lot of these outsider artists, they just get back directly.
AP Strange:Yeah, I mean to your point with Radionics, it's like some people have described it as like moving the radio dial until you hit the right one and now you got that transmission or it's a lot like channeling, you know, or wherever the muse moves you, you know, but thinking of it as a form of dowsing is really cool because you're guiding yourself there. It's not an extra personal force that's moving you. It's kind of you guiding yourself, which is really kind of cool.
Jay Shenk:I think so. I think that is
AP Strange:Well, just it's probably both, but
Jay Shenk:Well, I think this is one of those, I mean, here are we the universe just experiencing itself? The mind determines what reality is. So it's, this is, it's both, both, it's effectively the same thing. I kind of think that a lot about, again, a lot about the magical process of deciding you're a wizard, it's kind of the same thing. Is it psychological or is it really magic?
Jay Shenk:Like it doesn't matter. It's both. It's real anyway.
AP Strange:Yeah, it's both. It's neither. It's great. It's whatever.
Jay Shenk:Yeah.
AP Strange:It's all of those things. Well, it's like bringing it back to Breton is one of my favorite phrases or statements that he made was it's impossible to concede any immediate meaning to reality since it might mean or represent anything at all. It's just the basic conceit behind surrealism, but
Jay Shenk:I think that I and it's one of those things I think that's great. I know that really, that kind of thing really troubles some people. I think when you get into scientism and rationality and you go too far and you become the amazing Randy.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yep.
Jay Shenk:And you just get.
AP Strange:And you don't know how to experience wonder or magic anymore.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. Right. You're just kind of you you do yourself in. You probably of course we also know too if you go too far in the other direction. If you're spending 100% of your time in super reality, you may run into some problems.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. So,
Jay Shenk:you know, you've gotta
AP Strange:Well, I was about to say, Breton followed up that statement with talking about dashing into a crowd firing a gun. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:I think we wanna try to avoid that. Yeah. I mean, I think that unfortunately, I'll argue that the relativism and some people seeing the relativism of postmodernism being the dark side of being that super reality. And you know, reality is anything I want it to be, so it's bad, or I can do whatever I want because you know, you get a solstice viewpoint of like, oh, you know, we have that modern thing now where people are like NPCs.
AP Strange:Right, yeah. And I think of it as just a low rent interpretation. I mean, sounds elitist
Jay Shenk:It is.
AP Strange:But it's the non thinking man's version of gnosticism. It is.
Jay Shenk:It's like it it's it's just like you got you got the dollar general gnosticism. That's not what we want.
AP Strange:Well, you got got by the Pleroma, I guess.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. And I think again, that's why channeling it into art, and I say art writ large, you know, poetry, writing, music, whatever you're doing, that's like, I really, after learning about Doc Shields through you and your show and really just, I read his book and I read the one biography of his.
AP Strange:Monster Mind?
Jay Shenk:Monster Mind, yeah. And I'm just like, this guy, maybe other than the heavy drinking, this guy had it figured out. Right. To a large extent.
AP Strange:I'd also recommend Jonathan Downs book on the Owlman because it kind of gives you a little bit more of an outside personal perspective of shields because it's more a book about shields than it is the Owlman.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. And and I think some of that, I also think a little bit that going to an art museum, at the surrealist, looking at abstract painting is kind of how you can micro dose a paranormal experience or an encounter with the supernatural.
AP Strange:Yeah, absolutely.
Jay Shenk:You're really confronted with this unknown reality and how you react to it. And you can sit with yourself and be like, how am I reacting to this? Rather than just reacting like Stuke. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are really dismissive a lot that artwork reflexively. And if you can get past that and just be like, this is like, I'm encountering the unknown.
Jay Shenk:But you're encountering it in a safe place that has air conditioning in a gift shop. Much, much better than just kind of having the unknown leap out of the bushes at you. Right. Going out for a smoke and having the alien encounter or having the encounter with the, I'm in the woods and have the encounter with the Fae or whatever, that's a little more dicey.
AP Strange:You
Jay Shenk:can kind of grapple with the unknown and simulate that experience just by going to see some art.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. And I think that, you know, from the creation of art to the appreciation of it and the utilization of it in wider culture has a lot to tell us about about the supernatural, the paranormal, and and all these other subjects because art is so much a participatory thing. And you know, sometimes I think people people are will say they don't get it.
AP Strange:It's like, well, just go sit with it for a while. Like, there's nothing to get. It's it's looking at it and and you don't have to understand it. You don't need an art degree to to go look at a painting and tell me what you feel about it, right?
Jay Shenk:I told people that it's not like, if you can't explain what this painting's about to me by the time we close, you're trapped here forever.
AP Strange:Right. You know, it's not that you're
Jay Shenk:not in the twilight zone. There's no like everybody that can't pass the test has to work at the museum forever. Yeah. But that's, I think that's a feature of some of art in the twentieth century and beyond is that a lot of art is about that direct communication of a feeling, and it's not about intellectually decoding symbols. People just, they're not, nobody gets really trained to do that Yeah, in in a lot of our education.
Jay Shenk:I mean, I think that's why even before I was a paranormal weirdo, I was an art weirdo. People just like, Oh, you're weird because you're engaging with this. And I'm like, Yeah, you know, it's it's just another thing to engage with. You can, again, going to the toolbox with the quadrant, it's like, I'm engaging my mind this way. I'm in this quadrant now.
Jay Shenk:I don't have to be stuck in the scientism quadrant. Yeah. Right? You know, I don't have to be stuck in Well, increasingly Yeah.
AP Strange:Increasingly, it seems to me that, I mean, you can talk a lot about like neurodivergence and stuff becomes like the topic these days and people, but I don't know if there's anybody that's necessarily non diverging because I think we're all very different from a perspective standpoint, but that being said, I think that there's a large degree of people that don't, that think any exercising of the mind is like an important thing and they'd rather not do it. So anybody that does is weird, and I mean there are those of us that always have the impulse to either wanna know more, to experience more, to create more, to learn techniques or how to create more, it's all exercising that gray matter also inside your head.
Jay Shenk:It is, don't think we prepare people very well-to-do that.
AP Strange:Another- Yeah, but even still when you're, what led to your point earlier, like when you're younger and you're an art weirdo and people are like why are you why are you doing art why would you want to do that you know and it's like when you're a child like other children might think you're weird because you're the one doodling in the corner. Know that was the case for me yeah But
Jay Shenk:that's, I think what I said, don't prepare kids well for that because you should really be going like, what's like, not antagonistically, but you should like, what's your deal? Like, what do you, what's going on here? You're like, you know, I I think we need to be more understanding that just because somebody's doing something a little differently, of course, isn't catastrophic.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:Like nobody's going to die because I'm doodling.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:If I was if I was that powerful, you'd know it already. Yeah. If I had that kind of juice. But I also think that I'm reading this is I'm reading another book right now. Semi related reading Temple Grandin's visual thinking book.
AP Strange:Okay,
Jay Shenk:Temple Grandin is a designer. She's an industrial designer and she has autism and she is a visual thinker. So she thinks in pictures. And she is talking in her book about kind of how we, mostly in society, we are verbal society. We're verbal written society, even though we, you might argue that we're moving away from that as literacy decreases, but that's kind of how our education system is currently set up.
Jay Shenk:It's still there to do that. And the visual and verbal people really have a hard time communicating with each other because their modes of thought are so different. I learned to think about this on myself because I did, I'm verbal, I'm visual, but in visual terms, I'm an object thinker.
AP Strange:Okay,
Jay Shenk:so I can visualize an object. Like I didn't realize, and this is another thing, didn't realize people couldn't do this. You say think of an apple, I can think of a particular apple I've seen in the past as long as I can remember it. Or I can just think of like, here's what an apple is.
AP Strange:Yeah, I was about to say that there are people that can't just bring an image to mind when you you mentioned it. But for me, I can't help it. I immediately get an image if somebody mentions.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, I'm just like, I'm thinking like, yeah. And there are some people that I guess can do it, in black and white, or there are some people that can only do it in two d. There's gradations of it.
AP Strange:It's crazy.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. And there's thinkers who are the people that are really excellent at like kind of geography, mathematics, that kind of really understanding like the spatial relations. And those are the people that are the really good computer programmers, which is now I realize why I am struggling in all my programming classes. I am living personally living the current Doctor Manhattan theme, right? It's like it's 1996, I'm trying to learn to code and struggling.
Jay Shenk:2011, I'm trying to learn to code and struggling. It's 2025, etcetera. We don't talk about that in education. We don't talk about how to communicate with each other. We don't even tell people that.
Jay Shenk:Like some of you think in words, some of you think in pictures, and some of you think in abstracts. And we all have to kind of, there's value to all of these things and we all have to learn how to get them together. That's I think a lot of the people that think you're weird because you're an artist are just like, I'm a verbal thinker and I don't get this. And rather than that being okay, it's like, oh, I forget this. It's the same thing with seeing the seeing the painting.
Jay Shenk:It's like, I don't get this. I can't immediately decode this. The way I could have a realist depiction of like, here's this like, here's the schooner cresting the white caps, you know, it's like, I know what this is.
AP Strange:Well, it gets into a question of aesthetics too, which I think is something that, you know, might apply to outsider versus insider art. But I've see people that like really gaudy things, and you're just like Oh, and and you're like, why? Like, when you're looking at it, like, I can't understand why you're doing that on your wall. For me, that's like the live, laugh, love like home goods variety of decor. But Oh, yeah.
AP Strange:Increasingly what I'm seeing, it seems like a trend with people that like to just have an almost sterile environment where they have no art hanging on the walls. And that disturbs the crap out of me. If I walk into somebody's house and there's no art or pictures or clutter or things I'm like. That's
Jay Shenk:where I think I'm like, I hate to say it, I'm sure some of you have no art and are fine people, but that's like, I get serial killer vibes from that.
AP Strange:Yeah. I've heard him in American Psycho.
Jay Shenk:I do. I was just about to say I'm going to leave. I'm sure that Huey Lewis and the News albums are very good. I too have to return some videotapes. I'm out.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, it's weird because we do live in a primarily visual culture and a lot of We love TV, we love movies, the kids love anime and manga. We really have the rise of memes on the internet as a serious course of study. There were the guys, and this was on the right, and I haven't read any of these books, but I do think about it, that we're talking about the meme magic and kind of being literally talking about what we were doing before. Although again, you could argue like memetics is psychology. It is an infectious idea.
Jay Shenk:It doesn't have
AP Strange:to That's where the term comes from.
Jay Shenk:Where's the line between magic and just psychology on that? But some people really believe that they were doing magic by posting.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:And yeah, it's a it's a it's an interesting time. Unfortunately, it's mostly bad interesting.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:It's a period that if there if there's if the human race progresses, people will look back on this when they're reading it and just be like, oh.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. It's kinda like where people talk about how history is gonna look at this moment in time. And I'm like, history? You're optimistic?
AP Strange:I mean, when when
Jay Shenk:the aliens land and they're looking at these, you know, like, these people and they'll find the remnants of a Buc ee's and think that bronze beaver was our god and be like, they worshiped the Buc ee and you know.
AP Strange:That's really funny because I used to live in Salem, Massachusetts and there's a big statue of Samantha from Bewitched the center of town. Had a friend visiting once, he's like, if there was a really good apocalypse and like future humans came here and did an excavation, they would think this is like some kind of moon goddess that people worship.
Jay Shenk:Okay, here's something I think about every day. This is like a paper I would like to do if I had the time to pull it all together. But I think about the memetic transformation of the perception of the Mothman entity based on the decisions that one sculptor made. Because you think about, have you been to Point Pleasant at all ever?
AP Strange:I haven't, but I think I know what you're getting at.
Jay Shenk:Okay, so for the folks that don't know in Point Pleasant, was where the Mothman sightings occurred. There's a Mothman Museum. Outside the Mothman Museum, there's a Mothman statue created by a local artist out of stainless steel. The artist decided as a reference to use a bodybuilder. And the pose of the Mothman where he is kind of in a menacing, like lean forward from the rear.
Jay Shenk:He is as again, as the youth would say, caked up. He's got generous glutes.
AP Strange:Right. The moth ass has become a meme in and of It's become
Jay Shenk:a meme, but it's, I'm thinking about this. This will, I'll damage some of my cred. I really wasn't up on the Mothman until the Richard Gere movie came out. I saw the movie, my first copy of Mothman Prophecies was the movie poster, trade paperback version of that.
AP Strange:Yeah, same for me, actually. All
Jay Shenk:right. I was genuinely chilled by the story reading it the first time and the implications and the implications of these beings in a higher reality kind of being able to observe things and the nature of space time. And now Mothman is a cute thing. It's Mothman's juicy rear end. I see the perception of the entity.
Jay Shenk:It's very cute. I see a lot of go to a event, a cryptid event, there's Mothman plushies and there's stickers and it's just like the entire, the entire perception of this creature has been transformed by the decisions the sculptor made. This is where I'll be like a cock in the eyebrow going, was he channeling, was he using the dousing reflex or was something beyond wanting to alter the perception of the Mothman? Did the Mothman have an extra dimensional PR team? Did the Mothman decide I'm not being an object of terror and I want to be an object of affection now?
AP Strange:Yeah, maybe maybe it was the the spirit of Grey Barker was suddenly inflexing. Oh. Oh.
Jay Shenk:Oh my. Well, I think if that was true, the Mothman would definitely look a little less mature than he does in the current statue. Yeah, from from what I've I I think from recent revelations about Mr. Barker, but yes. But
AP Strange:well, the statue though, I mean the basic shape like the the monster shape that that the sculptor used was based also on the Frank Frazetta interpretation
Jay Shenk:right
AP Strange:Mothman so and not necessarily what was described in the witness accounts.
Jay Shenk:And that's just, you know, that's Frazetta being Frazetta. Right. If you would have asked Frazetta to paint like somebody pumping gas, you would have had like this muscled barbarian. Filling up their tank. But it's interesting, again, that art propagated through mimesis and became transformational into both the popularity of the Mothman and how people perceive it.
AP Strange:Yeah, that would be a fascinating study to do.
Jay Shenk:I have to, sometime if I have a minute, I just think about that is solution, but it's just like, what is he thinking about the Mothman's rear end in mimesis? Because people have, when I went down there, people stick money in the crack. Right.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:They leave offerings. They burn incense. Like there was incense when I my first trip to Point Pleasant 2021. There was incense burning behind the statue. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Like people are now.
AP Strange:People are leaving like cans of food too at one point. Yes. Cans of beans or beans,
Jay Shenk:yes. Yeah.
AP Strange:I don't know that I understood that, but
Jay Shenk:I don't know the reference to the cans of beans either. That just happened to me. It's it's just interesting again.
AP Strange:Well, here's something though. It's all shiny metal too, right?
Jay Shenk:So It like,
AP Strange:you can kind of see your reflection in his butt.
Jay Shenk:You can. And they still imagine, I have a magnet on my refrigerator that says I touch the shining hiney, that it's an official product that you can buy in their gift shop.
AP Strange:Okay, wow.
Jay Shenk:So yeah, they're they've decided to go with it.
AP Strange:But I guess, like, symbolically, I'm saying is that we are all Mothman's ass, really. We are. So
Jay Shenk:That's the I mean, eventually, that will turn into channeling the super reality. It will be like if you approach the Mothman's ass with an offering, true self will be revealed in the reflection.
AP Strange:Yeah. Well, I think we did it. I think we cracked the code.
Jay Shenk:I think we might have. You heard it here first, the AP Strange show. We we did it.
AP Strange:I think we we buried the lead. Now you can't even write that paper, you know?
Jay Shenk:You know what? People, it'll be one of those things. I'll do it anyway. It'll go on my blog and it'll be like, oh, it's only the third paper up there because I had the energy and the motivation to to fire two off and then, I don't know, somehow the next three years happened I just like, I still need to get back on to this but we'll get there at some point.
AP Strange:Right. Right. Well, time isn't real. Know, that's a I think Mafia could do just that much. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:It's not and yet. Yeah,
AP Strange:yeah, we keep getting older for some reason.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, or like I said, I, it's like I'm experiencing general relativity anytime I actually just want to get something done. And I'm like, I'm not enjoying the ride today. I want to get to the hardware store and get back. It's taking forever. So yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Meanwhile, if I just zoning out of dead watching Batman, the brave and the bold, which is my new favorite cartoon. I'm like, how's it midnight already? So
AP Strange:yeah, it does feel that way. It always feels like it's time to go back to work too soon, you know?
Jay Shenk:But we can always, you know, I was reading reading for school biography of Edward Boybridge, who was the guy that did the first motion studies of the horse running. And they were trying to determine whether a horse's feet were all off the ground or not. But he really launched the motion picture industry was birthed with that and talking about freezing chunks of time in a photograph. I don't know, but we can freeze some chunks of time in a photograph. Hopefully we can just kind of snap that time out later when we need it.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:There's magical thought for you.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. Yeah I feel like there's a lot of ways I could go with that but we have been going for a while and I didn't want to go too too long but I did want to ask you because I felt like bringing jumping in with us a few times throughout the conversation kept kept missing my chance, but when you're talking about like Radionics and like the idea of technology and radio in particular, I think like during this early twentieth century phase of discovering this stuff, I wonder about your thoughts with thinking of these invisible forces in terms of like waves and frequency like we do with radio like, because I don't think it works that way. But I think that was, that became the popular way to conceive of say telepathy is that there's some kind of wave like signal traveling from one mind to the other, right? And it's almost because it was simultaneous with the discovery of that stuff or around the same time.
Jay Shenk:And I think, I just thought, because I've been watching, again, I've been watching Batman cartoons, the way that's visually depicted with Aquaman's undersea telepathy radiating out
AP Strange:from Yeah, the circles coming off his head that get bigger.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, I think they've shown in the actual, if we're taking these seriously, which I do, going to some of the actual telepathy experiments with Ingo Swan and some of the studies that Dean Radin is still doing, it appears to be more instantaneous.
AP Strange:Right, But
Jay Shenk:I think that jibes now with some of the current concurrent experiments in quantum teleportation.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:And an electron existing in two places at once. I do think in that, that's, I'm gonna encourage everyone, I'm gonna encourage you to read that book on haunted media, because that does really delve into that. A lot of these things are, I don't wanna say recursive, but it's like a thing happens, we use a metaphor to describe it. Does the thing happen now conforming to that metaphor because we're all thinking it does that way? Or, you know, there is where we have influence on reality do we have?
Jay Shenk:Are we making it so? Because it was an easy it was an easy metaphor to understand radio radio waves, visible projecting force. Well, has the language of connection.
AP Strange:Yeah, the language is ill equipped for some of this really anomalous stuff, and I think that it's misleading. And you basically just nailed what I was what I was trying to get at. But yeah, when you're talking about like instantaneous communication, when you're talking about spooky action at a distance or quantum entanglement, I find that people get hung up on this where they're like, well they seem to be communicating with each other, but also acting simultaneously and like how does the signal travel faster? And like, there is no signal. They're the same thing.
AP Strange:They're tied together somehow.
Jay Shenk:Yeah.
AP Strange:And move in tandem, it's no like, hey, I'm moving over here now, so move over here. I think We use the word communicate and that's kind of what drives the concept and everybody gets stuck in this weird quagmire where we're mistaking the map for the territory, you know?
Jay Shenk:Definitely, some of that I think is the limitation of language. Some of that I think is kind of the particular limitation of English at times.
AP Strange:Right, specifically English.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, specifically English because it does struggle with nuance.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Sometimes when we're talking about, you know, when I'm talking, like saying about this experience with a piece of art, I see some of those, and I say this jokingly and kindly, but you have like a really long German word for the particular feeling you get when you step off the train in the snowy late autumn and dusk, they've made a word that. And we're just like stepping off the train and feeling it and not even knowing what to call it or to call it anything.
AP Strange:Right, yeah.
Jay Shenk:And I do think, yeah, I agree with you that there's a lot of things that the metaphor helps, it helps you understand, but then it also binds you to that one way of thinking.
AP Strange:Right, yeah, yeah. Yep. And where where it's simultaneously opening your mind and narrowing your scope, which.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. So can you start the radiomics, the the talking about the transmission that all happened? Everything in that happens. Simon happens. It just happens.
Jay Shenk:It's the distance. It's the same thing. It's like distance is no object.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I was listening to somebody talk about remote viewing the other day and it was, you you had guys like Pat Price that would claim that they were picturing the target before they even walked into the room and got the coordinates that they were supposed to remote view. So they got it ahead of time, you know, before they were even supposed to do it, you know.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. Or or discussing remote viewing distant planets or remote viewing the past.
AP Strange:Yeah. Right.
Jay Shenk:Yeah. And there's no there's no signal lag. It's not like I'm in a few 2,000 years ago. I gotta wait half an hour for my brain waves to travel back in in time. And it's just like I'm just doing it.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah, because I mean, I guess if we're going back to the super reality, time isn't really an issue, you know?
Jay Shenk:Right. Yeah, once you access the super reality, I mean, Newtonian physics is really great for like making light bulbs in our belts and stuff, but does, there's like a point where it's like, we're in the super reality now. I do think a lot of, I am a Dean Radin guy. I do think a lot of our problem is we just have that, we just like, oh, I don't want to talk about this. It makes me seem like a weirdo.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:And I'm observing I I pretend it's it's we're observing these things and then going, I pretend I do not see it.
AP Strange:Yeah. Yeah. And and and you can only kind of mention it as couched in well, this is an anomaly, but I I don't know what this is. There must be a mistake. You know?
AP Strange:There's, you know
Jay Shenk:Right.
AP Strange:The damned data as Charles Ford would call it. Yes.
Jay Shenk:Clearly, I mean, clearly we're seeing this, but it means nothing.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Disregard.
AP Strange:Right.
Jay Shenk:Oh, no, that's funny. I mean, I could talk about the roots and the causes of that. That's a whole other thing.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Yeah, I think it's interesting that, well, the Soviets being atheists took it a lot more seriously than we did.
AP Strange:Oh yeah, the Soviet experience, was Psychotronics?
Jay Shenk:Yes.
AP Strange:Stuff like that, yeah, yeah, that's all fascinating stuff that I only vaguely know about.
Jay Shenk:I know a little bit about it, but again, it's like on in the East, it is a serious field of study in the West. It is, know, Byron Ginson and Burroughs screwing around. Well, that's the level of seriousness it's taken at.
AP Strange:Right. Yeah. I mean, but all of this does tie together because you go back to the data is with the cut up method and that translates to Burrows, which translates to Bowie, which gets into David Lynch and, you know,
Jay Shenk:like It's all related.
AP Strange:There's a line of transmission with this like really kind of mystical stuff and also juxtaposition and randominity I think are super important and you're talking about like Batman cartoons and I was talking about like Frank Frazetta and stuff like that too. We're talking about outsider art versus insider art. I think the mixture of the high brow and low brow as far as art forms are concerned is kind of a super important factor to consider.
Jay Shenk:I really do too. Unfortunately, not to be an, I'm not an anti intellectual by any means, but I am a little bit anti the world of academe because I feel like low brow art, the high brow art ignores the visceral, which is ignoring a really key part of human experience.
AP Strange:The vital part, I would argue, yeah.
Jay Shenk:Absolutely. And it just wants to dismiss it as like primitive and barbaric and not worth considering. But again, you're cutting out, it's just like, well, we'll just cut out an entire really vital part of understanding who we are as human beings, how we think, how we perceive, how we feel, what's derived at that. So I do have a little bit of it's like when people belittle the quote unquote, know, it's like the quote unquote roller brow because I just enjoy things. You know, I enjoy the fine arts.
Jay Shenk:I enjoy a Batman cartoon that's kind of, Brave and the Bold is great. It's one of those that's made for kids, but it's like your parents are going to be watching with you. And Batman is very kind of dried or seabic to what everything is happening around him. I'm like, this is my favorite interpretation of the character. You know, like, he's just he's just he's got a lot of really funny asides in that show.
AP Strange:But
Jay Shenk:it's it's it's
AP Strange:I'll have to do a whole episode on Batman someday. Yeah. Just do, like, a deep dive on Batman as culturally path.
Jay Shenk:Absolutely. But it's like the synthesis is important. And I think that's gonna be my big lesson. The synthesis of whatever you're doing, doing the synthesis is important. Not gonna get anywhere when you're stuck in one quadrant.
Jay Shenk:If you're like, if you're a magical thinker 100% of the time, you'll go insane. If you're a religious thinker 100% of the time, you'll become a demagogue. If you're a scientific thinker 100% of the time, you're gonna excuse a lot of data because it makes you uncomfortable, but you can't even address uncomfortable nature You of know, if you're an artist, you may be a little too whimsical to fix the toilet. It's a, gotta keep the limber. You got a lot of tools in your mental toolbox.
Jay Shenk:Gotta keep the mind limber and gotta use the right tool at the right time. Yeah. Yeah.
AP Strange:Yeah. I think all of that is very appropriate and a good message to maybe close out with.
Jay Shenk:I do. That's that's. Yeah. That no, that's a good one. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:I think I think we've said, I mean, did. We solved a major mystery. We've had we've had a lot to say.
AP Strange:Yeah, we did. Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Was a good one.
AP Strange:We've taken a good hard look at ourselves and the shiny buttocks of Mothman and.
Jay Shenk:Yes. Had to had to confront what was revealed there.
AP Strange:Yeah.
Jay Shenk:Well, thank you again for having me on the show. I know it's been a while since we talked about doing this. I'm really glad we finally got to.
AP Strange:Yeah, man. I'm really glad to have you on. As far as my listeners go, if is there anywhere you'd like them to come yell at you online?
Jay Shenk:Oh, they think
AP Strange:We originally met on Twitter and that's
Jay Shenk:not We originally really met on Twitter. I have decamped the blue sky because Twitter is like, come on, man. Yeah. That's it's ridiculous. If you want, I will give you some show notes later if they want to read my two papers on my blog after that were published in like 2023 and haven't written anything in two years.
Jay Shenk:I'm gonna, maybe after I finish the masters, but
AP Strange:Yeah, okay.
Jay Shenk:I'll send that over because I can't even remember the URL of my own blog right now, but people can just go and holler at me on Blue Sky. Okay. Alright. Alright.
AP Strange:Sounds great. Yep. Alright. Well, thanks again for coming on, man. Hey, thank you.