Visualization

Visualize letting go of pains held from remembering hurts, disappointments, slights, losses, and insults -- watch them flutter away, one by-one...

OCD: Sitting with the Imps

Many people don’t get just how strong the urge to do an OCD compulsion is. They might say, “Just don’t do it -- simple.” If only using simple logic to override a feeling was that easy -- if it was, there wouldn’t be a disorder.

OCD is an anxiety disorder. A sufferer gets obsessions and feels anxiety about them. In order to relieve that anxiety -- they bow to "irrational" compulsions. The reason it's so hard to resist compulsions is that they hold out the hope that they will make you feel better -- temporarily. No one likes feeling anxious. If you do the compulsions, you don’t need to feel anxious -- temporarily. But you can’t keep just doing the compulsions. If you want to recover from OCD -- you need to keep resisting them.

You know when you have a really bad itch you have to scratch? Or there’s a chocolate cake in front of you and you really want to eat a piece? Resisting a compulsion is like resisting those, but much worse -- with the added complications of bucketloads of anxiety, and intrusive thoughts about what will happen if you don’t. 

You just know, if you give in to the compulsion, a bit of relief might come. And who doesn’t want relief? Who would choose to do something that makes them anxious? 

But when you have OCD and want to recover -- you have to actually learn to sit with the anxiety and uncertainty and deny the compulsion. Eventually, it will get easier and you won’t feel as strong a need to do the compulsions -- but for now, you must actually suffer the anxiety.

Medication combined with therapy is effective in most cases of OCD. Try not to suffer, or feel like you're crazy. Reach out for help from professionals. Much has learned about the neuroscience of this troublesome disorder since the 1980s. It was estimated in days past, that it took, on average, 17 years to get a correct diagnosis and/or help. This is no longer the case.

Stephen C. Datz Landscape Paintings

Artist's Statement:

"I endeavor to approach my work with, as jazz musician Stan Getz put it, 'an unpretentiousness, spontaneity, and poetry of honest emotion.' Plein-aire painting, to my mind, is ultimately about experience. It is a way for me to explore and savor the raw sensations of a given time and place, and allow myself to be guided by the spontaneous impressions I receive. It goes beyond just seeing a landscape as a picturesque subject -- it is a personal journey of discovery, through which I attempt to create paintings that carry within them the power and emotional content of my direct experiences.

I focus on pure landscapes because they intrigue me. I feel that landscape is so much more than just a backdrop for human affairs or wildlife. It has an intrinsic beauty and value that cannot be ignored or denied. A landscape painting carries an implicit sense of solitude and silent contemplation; an invitation, if you will, to the viewer, to step out of their world and lose themselves for a moment in the sublime beauty and grandeur of the natural world. 

Whether working in the field or the studio, I strive to infuse my work with a quality that exceeds the mere appearance of my chosen subject. I seek to share with viewers not just what I found interesting, but why it interested me. It is my aspiration that my paintings, when they are successful, become glimpses beyond the surface of both subject and artist and into the essential nature of both."

William G. Fricke House: Unity with Variety

"Unity with variety" -- the window to beautiful and interesting art...

Date: 1901
Address: 540 Fair Oaks Avenue, Oak Park, IL
City: Oak Park, Illinois
Accessibility: Private
Category: Residential

Commissioned in 1901, the Fricke house was designed during Frank Lloyd Wright’s brief partnership with the architect Webster Tomlinson. The client, William G. Fricke, was a partner in the school-supply firm of Weber, Costello, and Fricke. The house exhibits many key elements of Wright's mature Prairie House style -- including its stone water table, horizontal banding, overhanging roof eaves, shallow hipped roof, and stucco exterior. 

Nevertheless, tiered geometric masses, including another angular prow-like projection adjacent to the front door; and a centrally located three-story tower with long, thin windows and mullions, lend the building a vertical appearance. 

Wright may have been responding to the compact scale of the lot on which the house was built. Indeed, he also dealt with the narrow tract of the Isidore Heller house by building vertically. Wright appears to have abandoned the half-timbered surface treatment found in other contemporary designs in favor of a more reductive scheme that resembles the exposed structural armatures found in traditional Japanese architecture.

Buckminster Fuller: Tensegrity

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"Tensegrity" is a term with a rich and sprawling history. It was coined by Buckminster Fuller, the iconoclastic architect, engineer, and poet, to describe his vision of a new kind of architecture, one that looked like it was built by nature instead of by humans. 

In contrast to the pyramids, columns, and brick-on-brick buildings of the past, which pile solid elements compressively, one on top of the other, Fuller imagined a world full of unconventional structures that maintain their stability, or integrity, through a pervasive tensional force, hence the term tensegrity.

Fuller began developing his vision in the 1920s, at a time when many were exploring new directions in design and architecture. But it was his student, the sculptor Kenneth Snelson, who, in 1949, created the first structure to be defined as a tensegrity. Using two X-shaped wooden struts suspended in air by a taut nylon cable, Snelson captured the defining features of tensegrity:

Pervasive tension and a separation of rigid elements. In Snelson's now iconic structure, the compression-resistant struts do not touch but instead are individually lifted, each embraced and interconnected by a system of continuously tensed cables, a condition that Snelson and Fuller called "continuous tension, discontinuous compression."

Stable. Though ethereal in appearance—its wooden Xs appear almost to float—Snelson's sculpture is remarkably stable, despite its minimal use of rigid elements. This stability is due to the fact that tensile and compressive components are, at all times, in mechanical equilibrium.

Prestressed. This mechanical equilibrium results from the way the compression and tensile components interact to bring out each other's essential nature: the cables pull in on both ends of the struts, while the struts push out and stretch the cables. The result is that each element in a tensegrity structure is already stressed—the compression elements are already compressed, the tensile elements already tensed—and they are stressed by each other, a condition known as "self-stress" or "prestress."

Resilient. While they are stabilized by prestress, tensegrity structures are also exquisitely responsive to outside perturbation. Their components immediately reorient when the structure is deformed, and they do so reversibly and without breaking.

Globally Integrated. Because the components are so intimately interconnected, what is felt by one is felt by all, producing a truly holistic structure.

Modular. Though complete on its own, a tensegrity structure can combine with other such structures to form a larger tensegrity system. In these systems, individual tensegrity units can be disrupted without compromising overall system integrity.

Hierarchical. In fact, smaller tensegrity structures may function as compressive or tensile components in a larger tensegrity system, which in turn may perform a similar function in still larger systems.

For much of history, architecture had been preoccupied with making things stable but Snelson's X-structure unlocked a world in which structures could be flexible and firm, holistic and hierarchical. Over the past 60 years, artists, engineers, and architects have used the lessons of tensegrity to build previously "impossible" structures --.space frames, deployable moon-base shelters, as well as sky-piercing sculptures -- helping to realize Fuller's vision of a universe filled with man-made tensegrity structures.

Snelson would later argue that tensegrity is a principle that is realized only through man-made objects. But Fuller's vision rested on the conviction that nature builds using tensegrity. Indeed, the human frame with its many tensile muscles, ligaments, and tendons pulling up on the rigid bones of the body, thereby stabilizing and supporting them against the force of gravity, is a prime example of tensegrity at work. In the last few decades, scientists have shown that tensegrity is a fundamental design principle of nature, operating at the level of organs, tissues, cells, and even molecules (Ingber, 1998). Their discoveries are leading to a whole new array of man-made tensegrity structures, this time at the micro- and even the nano-scales.

Tensegrity is not an easy concept to grasp. It is best seen and felt, and authors often suggest that readers build their own tensegrity structures. Another way in is through history. What follows is essentially a story: the rise of tensegrity from a concept known to an esoteric few to become a well-recognized design principle of nature, one that is leading to radically new solutions to age-old problems in medicine, engineering and beyond.

Healthcare

I'm going to paraphrase what Herbert F. Johnson once said about his working relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright and apply it to health insurance:

"When we started out, with modest costs, the health insurance company was working for me. As the costs steadily mounted, the insurance company and I later became "partners" in the cost of healthcare. Now that the costs have shot into the stratosphere, in essence, I'm working for the insurance company."

Trigger

The talented palomino colt who would eventually become Roy Rogers’ "Trigger" began life as "Golden Cloud,” and began his incredible career in the 1938 film, "The Adventures of Robin Hood."

He was ridden by Olivia de Havilland, who played Maid Marian. "Golden Cloud” (soon renamed "Trigger") was offered as Roy’s movie mount shortly thereafter, along with four other equine actors, and according to anecdotes -- Roy knew immediately that Trigger was a very special horse. 

Over 31 years of life, Trigger starred alongside Roy in almost 90 films, 100 episodes of The Roy Rogers Show, and innumerable personal appearances. Now that’s a dedicated actor.