In A Silent Way / Miles Davis

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John Fraim

I never started out to be a leading poster. None of these leading posters ever really considered this as a goal. Rather, I think that perhaps more than anything else, there was the need and desire to share things.

For those who don’t know, Nextdoor is a national database of neighborhood emails tied to specific zip codes. In many ways, it is a contemporary version of the old telephone party line. A member of the locale associated with their NextDoor Neighbor account, can post anything to the site. The post can go either to various local areas or out to the entire NextDoor Neighbor national audience. 

I had started my own website called Midnight Oil Studios (https://midnightoilstudios.org) in 2016 and have posted over 600 articles to the site when I started posting to NextDoor Neighbor around 2022. If I could tell you one change that came over my overall worldview in this period of time – from 2016 to 2024 – was the change from creator to observer of things. I had seen myself as an artist for so long, it was difficult to open the curtains to the light of other artists out there. 

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In this period, I discovered that the world was so full of amazing things. Whether it was the millions of videos on YouTube and Vimeo or the images and music over the Internet. I learned that the Internet brings all these things to visibility. 

Whether one sees this “visibility” is another story. 

I’ve been more or less seeking this visibility as a type of radar net of the currents of popular culture. I’ve signed up for many free subscriptions to leading research and academic publications. Or leading Substacks. Add to this, I have had an old, close friend from my hometown of Los Angeles that has been instrumental in many of the posts to my NextDoor Neighbor account. More than anyone else, she sends me great pieces that often end up as posts from me on NextDoor.

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One of Our Top Posts to NextDoor / John & Richard – Farm on the way to Dayton.

I still posted a number of my own photos on NextDoor using HDR photography and they received large reviews. Then, my good friend Rich and I teamed up. Rich took many photos (with his iPhone 15 Pro X) from his many travels around the nation as an adjuster for a major insurance group. He sent me the jpgs of the photos and I would put them through my “editing car wash” of PhotoMatix 6 software. Then, I’d post to Nextdoor. 

Sometimes, I posted links to NextDoor with videos, images, words or music in them. Often, a direct link to my current post on Midnight Oil.

But again, if I was to try to sum up things in a big way tight now, I’d say that, overall, the change over the years in my worldview from creating things to finding things. There is so much to see when one is not so interested in continuing to create a personal ego essence. Perhaps this was the lesson learned over the years from 2016 to 2024 on my Midnight Oil Studios site. There are a lot of interesting truths out there other than those coming out of one’s mind.

Another Top Post to NextDoor / John & Richard – Early Morning Ohio Countryside

The world is about discovery as much as creation.

I try to show the NextNeighbor community what I have discovered in life.

Maybe later, I’ll let Midnight Oil and NextDoor see/feel what I have created in life. From discoveries in life, perhaps, mixed with one’s creations in life. What an incredible blend if this would at all be possible.

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It seems the way of my particular (peculiar) artistic muses. That is, their appearance and disappearance. Nothing I have any control over. It’s enough to battle it from taking control over me. I knew it was related to the cyclic dynamics of Jung’s symbolism.

I remember finding my first “door” into the world of Carl Jung through finding the book Jung & The Story of Our Time. At my favorite bookstore Shakespeare & Company on Telegraph, a few blocks from the UC Berkeley campus. I was living in Piedmont at the time, just south of Berkley.

It was not a book published by some psychological group. Rather it was a book by a person who knew Jung and also happened to be one of the world’s greatest writers. And adventurers. Laurens van der Post was born in Africa in 1906. Most of his adult life was spent divided between Africa and England. His professions of writer and farmer were interrupted by ten years in the army, behind enemy lines in Abyssinia, the Western Desert, and the Far East, where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese while commanding a small guerrilla unit. He went straight from prison back to active service in Java. He was awarded the CBE for his services in the field. For an introduction to Jung, this is the book to read.

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Yet, more than Jung perhaps. Perhaps not.

Let’s assume perhaps not.

The whole scheme proposed by Jung little more than a fraud on the psyche? Providing a twisted way of seeing the inner workings of collective psychology? Yet twisted did not necessarily mean a different reality. Rather, the same reality but rather twisted to a different place on the same 360 degree spectrum.

Listen to the incredible music of Miles Davis above. A piece from his breakthrough period from jazz into a new type of jazz demonstrated on his Bitches Brew album. Certainly, a revolutionary album in the history of modern jazz. Perhaps in all of modern music.

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A post to NextDoor Neighbor is like this. What better way to spread a particular message or observation or comment on life. The daily observations about life from my neighbors. Mixed with my own feelings and put into a personal journal mixed with a biting, cultural critique. Caught in posts to Midnight Oil. So many of these reposted to NextDoor Neighbor.

In this crazy age of the production of ongoing dystopian worlds, it is good to know that one still has connections to certain people. Outside all the modern production. A connection that provides that sense of balance for a person. In effect, the “re-setting of one’s internal compass” of life.

The above might be a wonderful thing to go through in reflection. Yet something that is very dis-orienting at the time.

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Things come along in life. Like those old jazz albums I reviewed in my Jazz Newsletter of the late 70s and early 80s I sent out to something like 350. It was printed on an 8 1/2 x 14 colored paper with the headlines made with the scratch on letters. The rest was typed on my electric typewriter. The Newsletter became well known in the jazz crowd of San Francisco at the time.

The enterprise of the newsletter was something usually done over the weekends.

Reviews of a particular new jazz artist or album. Why was I interested in some of these artists. And, not others?

A good question left for a later post.