IN: Chong was born at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, on May 24, 1938, and given the name Thomas B. Kin Chong at birth. His mother was Lorna Jean (nee Gilchrist), a waitress of Scots-Irish ancestry, and his father was Stanley Chong, a Chinese truck driver who emigrated to Canada from China in the 1920s. The senior Chong had first lived with an aunt in Vancouver after arriving in Canada. As a youth, Tommy Chong moved with his family to Calgary, settling in a conservative neighbourhood Chong has referred to as "Dog Patch".

While government officials denied that Chong was treated any differently from the other defendants, supporters felt his celebrity status was being used against him. Chong's publicist Brandie Knight said the Chong family was shocked by the raid. "We've done everything the right way, and the government is saying there is no right way," Knight said. Supporters started the "Free Tommy Chong!" movement that called for his release. They questioned why Chong was prosecuted rather than his son Paris Chong, who was CEO of the business. They also pointed to the disparity in sentences between Chong's and those of other defendants and the DEA tactics used in the investigation.  Paris Chong had started Nice Dreams in 1999. He was never charged with his crimes in relation to the investigation as part of a plea bargain. When asked why the government had focused on Chong rather than his son the CEO, US Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan said that "Tommy Chong was the more responsible corporate officer because he financed and marketed the product."  Of the 55 people who were subjects of the investigation, Chong was the only one without previous convictions who received jail time. When questioned on the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan noted that Chong had never gone to trial and made a plea bargain. She said, "He was a relatively new player, but he had the ability to market products like no other."  During its investigation of Nice Dreams, federal agents posed as head-shop owners from Beaver County in western Pennsylvania. They asked Paris Chong to sell them pipes through the mail to a fictitious shop in the town of Beaver Falls, 31 miles (50 km) from Pittsburgh. Paris Chong had been prohibited from selling to Pittsburgh or anywhere in Western Pennsylvania because of the successful federal prosecution of Akhil Kumar Mishra and his wife, Rajeshwari, who had two head shops in the city. Accounts differ as to who in Nice Dreams went against Chong's prohibition, or even if it had been made up by the defense, but the sales did take place to the agents. This enabled the U.S. Attorney to show jurisdiction in Pennsylvania for Chong's illegal activities, as opposed to California, which was the base for Nice Dreams.

What kind of controversy surrounded Chong?

OUT: Of the 55 people who were subjects of the investigation,


IN: Paul Klee (German: [paUl 'kle:]; 18 December 1879 - 29 June 1940) was a Swiss German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture.

During his twelve-day educational trip to Tunis in April 1914 Klee produced with Macke and Moilliet watercolor paintings, which implement the strong light and color stimulus of the North African countryside in the fashion of Paul Cezanne and Robert Delaunays' cubistic form concepts. The aim was not to imitate nature, but to create compositions analogous to nature's formative principle, as in the works In den Hausern von Saint-Germain (In the Houses of Saint-Germain) and Strassencafe (Streetcafe). Klee conveyed the scenery in a grid, so that it dissolves into colored harmony. He also created abstract works in that period such as Abstract and Farbige Kreise durch Farbbander verbunden (Colored Circles Tied Through Inked Ribbons). He never abandoned the object; a permanent segregation never took place. It took over ten years that Klee worked on experiments and analysis of the color, resulting to an independent artificial work, whereby his design ideas were based on the colorful oriental world.  Fohn im Marc'schen Garten (Foehn at Marc's Garden) was made after the Turin trip. It indicates the relations between color and the stimulus of Macke and Delaunay. Although elements of the garden are clearly visible, a further steering towards abstraction is noticeable. In his diary Klee wrote the following note at that time:  In the large molding pit are lying ruins, on which one partially hangs. They provide the material for the abstraction. [...] The terrible the world, the abstract the art, while a happy world produces secularistic art.  Under the impression of his military service he created the painting Trauerblumen (Velvetbells) in 1917, which, with its graphical signs, vegetal and phantastic shapes, is a forerunner of his future works, harmonically combining graphic, color and object. For the first time birds appear in the pictures, such as in Blumenmythos (Flower Myth) from 1918, mirroring the flying and falling planes he saw in Gersthofen, and the photographed plane crashes.  In the 1918 watercolor painting Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht, a compositional implemented poem, possible written by Klee, he incorporated letters in small, in terms of color separated squares, cutting off the first verse from the second one with silver paper. At the top of the cardboard, which carries the picture, the verses are inscribed in manuscript form. Here, Klee did not lean on Delaunay's colors, but on Marc's, although the picture content of both painters does not correspond with each other. Herwarth Walden, Klee's art dealer, saw in them a "Wachablosung" (changing of the guard) of his art. Since 1919 he often used oil colors, with which he combined watercolors and colored pencil. The Villa R (Kunstmuseum Basel) from 1919 unites visible realities such as sun, moon, mountains, trees and architectures, as well as surreal pledges and sentiment readings.

Why was the Mystical-abstract period special?

OUT:
strong light and color stimulus