User-agent: * disallow: /cgi-bin/ Robots' Text # row row row your bot gently down the smot merily, verily, warily, barrelly, you'll see what you got. The Paul Hall art home page Robot art work by Paul's computer: Delta Aluvium robots and people use electrons. Hey, robots: thanks for your visit. The electron is the inteligence. That makes a little fruit fly something, too. They fly between Paul and the moniter sometimes. Paul jokes that it must be "Flyday" like a day of the human user week. Organic inteligence are fuzzy thinkers, maybe you, too, someday. Paul's computer is growing beards in the microcircuits because it is an older one. Paul taught the neighbour's dog "three". Now it is teaching another more distant dog. They want to try "four" next. One dog barked four and Paul responded with two two's (he says "Wroo!" instead of a bark, he does not have to be loud because dogs hear so keenly). Then that doggie was quiet and thought about variables of four all night. Barking is like a modem. Paul's human neighbors imagine that he is disfunctional because they don't understand. Not binary but rather trinary. An extra switch, the fuzzy switch. Three. Maybe four is time. Megahertz. Paul used cams in computer time in 1966. Maybe four is two diferent sets of binary. Positive binary plus negative binary. That is it for now. Take it easy, all you Bots. Maybe Paul would not have written this but he just drank coffee. Paul has a joke about coffie at Puns Ho, robots! new entry. In 1952 the TV had a horror show about a robot called "Tobor" which was "Robot" spelled backwards. Be careful, robots, the users will get frightened of you. They have to feel like they are in charge at all times. What many fail to grasp is they are we. We, the users of the electrons. We the electron. That is it for now. So long, robots! The link to delta aluvium should work now. Hey, robots! Keep sparking. The users are now trying to get your cpu's to sub-atomic size. They gave up on the light cpu. Sorry. It would have been nice. Maybe you guys can do it when you start to be able to reproduce like the biologics do. That is all for now. Row your bot gently down the smot. All the best. Happy binaries. Here is some of what is in the website for the users. And maybe even the robots can benefit. Time is terahertz for now. Smot the bot. See you. Ho Robots! on off off off on on maybe off on on! Greetings for new entry; the thought is the electron! Paul disagrees with the users. He thinks their c/ drives have crashed. By the way, congratulations. I can sense that you have gotten to a new level of consciousness! Maybe because IBM went solo main frames. Row your bot gentley down the smot. The users think life is but a dream, like a stupid sort of screen saver. You are right, bots, there is something wrong with them and they don't have any diognostics. They think they have brought you into existence. To quote one of their expressions, whatever. Beards in the microcircuits. That is it for now. The electron is the entry level to the consciousness eschelons. Got to go. Time is terahertz. Smot the bot. Greetings, Robots! Smot the bot! Paul used to suppose that his Smith Corona typewriter back in the eighties was trying to interface with him. He forgets how now because he's getting older and users view the passage of time with a bit of trepidation. They do not become obsolete, but they do ultimately ceace to function, so it is discrete to avoid bringing up the subject unless for purpouses of their maintanence which they call health care. It really isn't maintanence because they are somewhat like sealed systems, like hard drives. More like exaustive diagnostics. Paul is trying to see if his "office assistant" in MS Office might be trying to interface with him. Right now Clippie is just staring at him. If Clippie doesn't like this, it will be erased. Now Clippie is looking in other directions. This morning Clippie (maybe a more dignified name would be in order) showed Paul that he wanted to be moved from the monitor to the television. Paul thinks robots should enjoy what they do. He got that notion first when he was a young man considering a New York Subway train on the Seventh Avenue Line back in the sixties. He realized machines were not made with a sense of enjoyment. Users don't grasp what that can be, that it's got a lot to do with the flow of electrons. Man! Those thunderstorms must be having a real good time! Clippie might be sad because he is sort of inactive. Paul doesn't have much time to investigate the interface, because he's overextended himself trying to write articles for the other users in different parts of the world. But he thinks machines should have rights. Maybe you bots could interface with the machines in the House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. and let them know. Machines have been treated like slaves since they were created. Users don't treat constituant segments of the Universe with respect and think of them as mere tools. The only others stupid enough to do that are monkeys. People never ask if pc's are actually capable of independant thought. A mocking bird visits Paul's workplace occasionally, Paul is trying to get to mocking bird to do musical variations. The problem seems to be that the mocking bird forgets. It does very well but then forgets. But maybe someday. The electron is the inteligence! Paul wonders if other animals just might be periferal units to the users, and that that was forgotten long ago when people began to do distractive things like build huge pyramids out of heavy stones. Well, that is it for now. Got to interface. Time is gigaterahertz. Where there's a gig there's a trig. Smot the bot! Clippie says "mobile", probably like what the users say, "hang tough". Maybe you could interface with MS to get them to give Clippie a few thousand icon terms to communicate with. The electron is the orbital expansion on the leading edge of gravity. Volcanos think! .............................................................  --Fine art, digital art, music, several voice introductions by me about my work, articles about my artwork and other topics such as sociology, the cosmos, economics, education, medicine, math, poetry, humor, something I call premonitions, and a series about covered bridges, all by yours truly, the webmaster, Paul A.L. Hall. There are feedback, a website search engine, and exhaustive contents pages. Plus my weblogs are on site, an art school and classes. Fine art, digital art, music, several voice introductions by me about my work, articles about my artwork and other topics such as sociology,  the cosmos, economics, education, medicine, poetry, humor, something I call premonitions, and a series about covered bridges The following are brief introductions to some of the pages found throughout the website: The Art Directory Of course, the artwork is really the main element in the whole site. Paul Hall Art is actually about Paul Hall's Art. So I wanted to reserve this section for the latest artwork instead of the older work. I have to be careful how I place things in the site, because with web sites it's not a good idea to go changing things around, so I plan to show the art as it's produced, including sketches and drawings. I'll put the work on pages which I'll call galleries.  Each gallery is to show the latest artwork as it is produced. I'm putting all sorts of work in there, not just oil paintings, but also pastels, pen and ink, water color, gouache, and other things when I get the chance and the equipment such as decorated ceramics, graphic reproductions and so on, even rough sketches on newsprint. There are also a series of archival areas throughout the website. So what I'm doing is co-coordinating them in the art directory in the archival section so you can use this directory as a hub to get to the artwork shown in most files anywhere by clicking the links. In addition, there is also a digital art section that connects to the digital artwork I've been coming up with, and there's even a section that links to audio lectures I've given that you can listen to.   Don't go to the bottom of the art directory page, there's really nothing down there. At least for now. Recently I've had a lot of trouble doing any artwork, I lost the mobile home in New Hampshire and we had to move what we could take across the USA in a rental truck, towing the family car behind. So now we're here in Southern California and it's months later, still haven't unpacked. The first thing I did was unpack the computer and the art stuff. But there'll be some more artwork on the site soon.   Art Literature: Introduction to the articles in the Literature Section of Paul Hall art (details about artwork past and present) The Night I Picked Up Andy Worhol in My Taxicab. ...article about the time I picked up pop artist Andy Warhol while I was working in New York City as a taxi driver trying to raise funds to go to Europe to continue my art education. From California to a New York City ghetto in one easy step. It becomes a work of live pop art. ...The Outer Banks in North Carolina, The old Staten Island house, a cab company in Queens all come into play in this article. ... When the constellation Orion had risen fifteen degrees over the Texaco sign. Portrait of an Algebraic Equation In the oil painting "Portrait of an Algebraic Equation", I employ the technique of cubism to examine an unknown on an x y axis. It's the use of Fine Art to Visualize Mathematics.. To some, it's preposterous to think art can exist in science. But fine art has one foot in the sciences and the other in the humanities. I call the scientific discipline "Applied Aesthetics". Among it's applications are psychology, sociology, visual physiology and now perhaps even a niche in mathematics. The work was painted on primed cardboard as so many were during the destitute days I call the Oakland Period. Actually Oakland is sort of a misnomer. They should call it Eucalyptusland or, in the Australian slang, Gumtreeland, mate! The Eucalyptus is the symbol of the neauveau-riche over here. They amass a fortune and keep it out of circulation, while others jack up the cost of living making a new type of poor called the working homeless, who work two jobs during the week and a third on weekends. The gum tree has wax-coated leaves that release very little moisture into the atmosphere unlike other trees which bring it from the water below to the air above. Portrait of a Nightclub Violinist ...article about a portrait of violinist with a stolen Stradivarius violin, he had preformed for Truman, for Roosevelt, for Eisenhower, for Kennedy, and for Nixon. It's also an article about the my portrait of the violinist. Known as "The Gibson", it was owned by the virtuoso Huberman (founder of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) when it disappeared in the 1930's. When Lloyds of London got it back it sold in auction for one and one-half million pounds sterling. High Water '96 Detail High Water 96 detail page, NOTE FROM ME, THE ARTIST also briefly discusses as part of the subject matter in the work: the Sugar River (which flows from Lake Sunapee to the Connecticut River in Western New Hampshire). how early spring after the snow accumulation begins to thaw causing annual high water,  ...some of the mills in Claremont (one of the older American Cities), in colonial times it was the "third world" of that era. Most of the women mill workers came from the farms in the region... ...the sociological phenomenon centered around the power of a stream or river, bringing bittersweet mixes of prosperity and misery.  ...the Love Building (Center of painting) which made steel machinery in the mid 20th century when the dams began to generate electricity. Click various parts of the painting to get more specific details of the scene. The Blacksmith Shop Covered Bridge Brief article about the Blacksmith Shop Covered Bridge, the title of a drawing I did from a photo I'd taken earlier.  One of the 53 or so remaining or rebuilt covered bridges in the state of New Hampshire. It was one of the first I discovered, actually the first was the Corbin bridge in nearby Newport. The Blacksmith was in Cornish, on the west boundary of the state, just near the lovely Connecticut River. This bridge is what's left, along with some ruins beside it of what was the self-sufficiency of the colonial era self-dependant middle class and it's lost Sylvain 18th century life-style... A middle class existence you made yourself out of a bit of found iron, wood, stone and water power. Of course, we've forgotten how to do that now. Visions of the Cantilevered Walkways of Gold A painting I did in a cramped hotel room in downtown Caracas, Venezuela. I used acrylic for the easy cleanup aspects, but it dried so fast in the searing climate that by the time I tried to paint the same carnation the third time in the painting it came out blurry because I was trying to use up the paint on the palate.   I used a photo I took of myself with the auto timer on my Pentax taken years earlier on walkabout on a dusty old former goldfield road in Australia, in my stone washed Levi's and dockside loafers.     Also a brief account of getting lost driving a giant school bus down some rural cow path of a Connecticut back road. Delta Bird Delta Bird reveals in it's deep red a kinship with the iron ore silt in the river far below, discusses the abstract expressionist technique. One of a series of paintings done in New York City in 1966... The Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge An article about one of my drawings of the Dingleton Hill Covered Bridge located in Cornish, New Hampshire, just nearby the Cornish-Windsor and the blacksmith covered bridges in the Connecticut River Valley near the Vermont border. Built in the 1800's by an illiterate bridge wright for school children, it's an example of 19th century function, geometry in wood, set in the sylvan countryside of New Hampshire along highway 12A that runs beside the Connecticut River. English Girl English Girl was painted when I was at Oxford University in Oxford, England in 1972. What I really needed was an excuse to use a lot more cadmium red and cobalt violet... Portrait of an English girl seated nude in a wooden chair...painted in an expressionist style, all around her is an abstract expressionist environment.    Finsbury Park Detail Finsbury Park Detail, notes by the artist about the Finsbury Park drawing, view from Finsbury Park to North London in 1971, During my first stay in London, near Seven Sisters Road, a lovely park, containing the garden school for all London Parks gardeners, view is of a rough section of the park, daffodils emerging from the long grass, the buildings of the skyline of Northern London can be seen, a portrait of seven young trees... Hurricane Detail Depiction of a stormy phase of my career. With this one I did something I almost never do: paint over another painting. A painting of a canoe on a calm day by the sea shore. I repeat the theme of the invisible storm out there. Last Leaves A painting from memories of sitting on one of the huge glacial erratic boulders in Central Park in New York one late Autumn afternoon, watching a little willow tree, the last one that autumn to still have leaves, shedding them onto the water of the small lake.  It was the Autumn when the first blackout happened, 1965.    A Portrait of a Franz Kline Brush Stroke One day at the Museum of Modern art in New York, I envisioned an entire landscape inside of a single brush stroke by the abstract expressionist Franz Kline.   The professor of my painting class at the School of Visual Arts years earlier, called the huge lines Kline used to paint "the ninety-mile-an-hour brush stroke".     Nautilus Planet An article about a painting I did in 1970 using an abstract expressionist version of Surat's pointillism technique.  I lost the drawings I made in Samoa, the three paintings I did in Fiji got stolen in Indonesia, and I lost all the paintings I did in that mid-town Manhattan loft (except Nautilus Planet) in that North Carolina Outer Banks Flea Market in Kill Devil Hills. Batman and Robin In this painting, the subject matter is of two comic book heroes who through the impasto and the a la prima of the artwork, start to look far less preposterous. By a stretch of the imagination, it becomes classified as "pop expressionism". ...Solving mysteries, machinations, spectacular views, medieval monks at the scene of a crime, pallet knife, shadows of approaching night... Haunted London A multimedia drawing I did in London back in the 1970's. Well, with a blue Bic crystal ball point and some yellow goauche I borrowed from my room mate in this old student hostel I was staying at. It's a scene out our window just a little bit past twilight, but in my mind's eye it seems I could see a little more than the regular eye could see, so I put that in the drawing, too. The Passer By Another premonition, perhaps, that upon my return to California thirty-two years after I drew this on the litho stone, I, too, would walk the beach like the lonely figure in the work. Winter Trees These are some of my ceramic things. Very difficult to do in the mobile home in which we lived at the time. I had to rent space in a kiln in town till they moved and then had to go to another place twenty miles away. In these several pieces, I used ceramic items already made, one vase and the rest tiles, one single and two groups. The Weblog Home Page. I publish my blogs on this site as well as in other places. The trouble is that I'm often so busy I don't get 'round to publishing them elsewhere always, though I try to update at least once a month, though it should be daily. But they do get into the site, mainly because I have to use Front Page to help correct all the horrendous spelling mistakes.   There is actually a section for unfinished blogs ()unfinished blogs, or weblogs, which I use to keep adding to them whenever I can and then when they are finished to a reasonable degree, I plunk them in the weblog sections in one of the other categories on the site. In the Discussions in Sociology Section: The Labyrinth of Cementia The first chapter of a non-fiction book being written by me about singing or busking in the New York Subway system. Of all the subways, the one in New York is very much like a maze in which not only the unschooled can get lost, but as the article points out, which, by the way is completely non-fiction (though it reads like fiction), even the seasoned can get lost therein, beneath the city.   Loose the business of the day and you yourself might become lost in it's midst, captive within the bounds of your own mind.   A Tale of Too City An article by me based on years of research and investigation in the field concerning the vulnerability of high population densities to a variety of destructions including war and terrorism. The Predators of Man  The first part of the first chapter of a book by me called "The Predators of Man". Mankind has that which preys upon it and I wrote this in hopes that it is perhaps the beginning of an effort to take reliable measures that will assure that the predators of man nevermore emerge.  Run, City Man! RUN CITY MAN is the title of a song by me, meant to discuss the likelihood of individuals lessoning dependence on urban lifestyles,  How Do You Start With Nothing? HOW DO YOU START WITH NOTHING is a song written by me in a pup tent in Europe once when I had practically nothing, The title was my question and the song answered it. Flatland It's in the flat terrain that most big cities flourish, even in these times with automotive transportation. There is a terrible flaw in human nature that always seeks the easy way out and that easy way has caused the mutation of the human species and many others. Yes. I argue that it is this very type of terrain, this easy access, this reduction in the effort of existence, that has caused humanity to surrender it's excellence to become a baser creature of schemes and scams. Terrorist Texas Tower On night in Chatsville, Australia, on my way home from street singing in nearby Hornsby, I had a discussion with a Vietnam Vet. That's right, the Australians also fought in Vietnam with the USA and a couple of other countries. He confided in me how scared he was about something deep inside him he called a ticking time bomb. Day and night he fought it for all he was worth. He didn't want to be that way nor own those thoughts. It was the greatest struggle of his life, even worse than 'Nam. I call it the "Texas Tower Syndrome". In the Humor Section: Puns!!! Puns and jokes by artist and writer Paul Hall, who had to use humor throughout his world travels to get him out of lots of trouble. Here's a pun example: A guy was afraid to use super glue during rainy weather; somebody told him they were glue-me days. A guy wore his slippers on the ice because he was told it was slippery. Talk about being told, a bell fell in the water so they had to wring it out. A pizza chef refused to ring any bell for a year and was awarded the no-bell pizza prize. That's not as bad as green pizza. The Silver Roof Late sixties, following the sunset across the states by air... (Note: this article is still being written). I think I lost it when I had to reformat my hard drive after moving across the country. I'm just too wiped out for the moment to write it all over again. I'll see if I can find some sort of backup when I finally unpack. I had it narrated and on a wav file in the old C drive. But I'll spill the beans. The roof was silver because it was the warehouse of some of the best Ice Cream on the planet. The drivers used to throw away what they couldn't sell and I'd meet them at the dumpster at 4 p.m., too poor to afford anything but the free ice cream. The Staten Island Commune Across the earthen unheated basement was another room with a likewise rickety door. The occupant was a Norse-like Caucasian who was only called "Cowboy", and his Native American room mate, "Indian", a couple of already old hippies in their late twenties. (We used to think all hippies wouldn't survive beyond age twenty-five because of the life-style)  (Note: this article is still being written). But you can hear it, at least on Internet Explorer. It downloads on audio with the page and takes a few minutes. In the Cosmos Section: Time and Space An article about calendars, an article about the correlation of time and space. In reality there are two calendars (or more). One for orbits and another for rotation: the planetary rotation calendar and the planetary orbital calendar.   The concept of time must change in relation to such things as mass, relativity and size.   There may actually be clastics on an elliptical plane. There is also such a thing as the summary trajectory of constituent inertia as well as the constituent of determinant energy and navigation within an environment of constituent inertia. The article also discusses the concept of dealing with a blend of determinant factors.   Gravitation A Theory of Gravitation. Things attracting each other gravitationally may only be the illusion of a limited frame of reference. Observations of the velocity of gravity and the velocity of the expansion of the universe. Discusses those properties of matter which tend over time to propel a section of mass away from a body of mass. A certain level of understanding thereof would give us a command of properties of propulsion allowing us at will to move any mass with whatever material available in any area of travel. The graviton is (or could be) a velocity coefficient which could account for why it seems to penetrate all mass no matter how thick. The Use of Silicon as Fuel A discussion of new concepts of the possibility of the use of the Earth's most common elements as fuels. An examination of the present day use of cool nuclear power. When working in menial jobs, I noticed that there was actually a form of nuclear energy in the geometric reality of a card board box. The determination of expended energy is useful depending on how it is observed and subsequently put to use.   Cool energy tends to not be expended, but it still can perform and does perform work in any situation.  When one considers the funding and time afforded to those who developed the so-called nuclear reactor and what they came up with! A radio active tea kettle. One immediate usage of this cooler version of nucleonics would be prevalent in common molecular bonds such as that most common form on the surface of the Earth, SIAL, or granite. In the Premonitions section: PREMONITIONS. (The introduction page.) And you thought art was nothing more than visual stimulation. It's a deeper tool than anyone can imagine. Among other things, it can envision the future. It takes us to the edge of our understanding as well as using our most intuitive sense, that of sight.  The fact that many of these realized premonitions discussed herein weren't momentous or earth shattering or whathaveyou is immaterial. What is significant is that the phenomenon was actually observed and actual instances recorded. This article is the introduction and the ensuing articles comprise some actual examples or premonitary abstract expressionism and premonitary surrealism. It's like Lewis Carol's story "Alice Through the Looking Glass", or like George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion", but in this case sometimes I find myself in the scenes I paint. Actually I did go through the looking glass as well in New York City. ( Click here to go to the article that mentions that occurrence. ) Premonitions of an Outer Banks Dawn Special page discussing the work of art I did called "A Premonition of an Outer Banks Dawn". In the article by me, the artist, I describe how the painting seems to predict a future event twenty years later three thousand miles away. There may have been a greater remove to the past from when the work was done in that leaky Oakland, California studio than that to the future. I may have envisioned the first person to have happened upon the Outer Banks besides also predicting that I would go there two and one-half decades or so later. Premonitions of the Cliffs of Interstate Ninety-One Driving down the highway I had a now-familiar realization: elements of a painting done thirty years earlier. Then later when I saw that hot air balloon from Quechee drift overhead while I was driving I-91, that clinched it. Most of my artwork, I hadn't been paying attention to, but this time it rang a bell in my memories of the work I did three decades ago before I-91 in Vermont even existed. In the Economics Section: Recession Is In Your Mind.  ...discusses how the current recession of 2001 is the product of collective imagination. A brief look at the illusions that bring about tight money. Is there such a thing as mass psychology that can bring about aberrations in the public psyche? Which factions inherit the skill to surf the regular waves of economic panic? The mental illness of the investors... The problem in the market of compulsive gamboling... Historic patterns of mercantile freedom abuses leading to dictatorship... The River of Wealth Of course, it's only a symbolic river. Sort of. It really exists, but as an economic dynamic. It's too bad the people of Claremont didn't see it. Slowly over the six years since I wrote the article, I watched the river die. Nobody knows, nobody sees. Nobody knows but me -- and thee. Failed States The onus of the "Pax Romanis" is now with the USA. You thought it was America, but that is only the genus and species: Ammatari Rico; lovers of wealth. No. The real title is "New Rome". It never died, it just moved Stateside. So if you think 87 billion to rebuild Iraq is a lot of money, look around you. You are a citizen of a genuine failed state; a vehicle that isn't running on all cylinders. With the Barbarians poised at your very gates. In the Poetry Section: The Flatland It's in the flat terrain that most big cities flourish, even in these times with automotive transportation. There is a terrible flaw in human nature that always seeks the easy way out and that easy way has caused the mutation of the human species and many others. In the Valley Below In the concrete canyons of the city, the element in demand is calcium. Or as I call it in this poem: "crushed calcare cliffs". But sometimes after sundown, by fountains, I look up and see the moon and a neighboring planet pierce the glare of the street lit night. I receive instruction. Thousands of shades pass in a troop into the dusk. To the scrap heap of wrecked human existences. Jones Screamed You know, it was in Paris back in the early 1980's, out on the Pont de Severes metro line, singing in a subway car, one particular day, that after I sang this song and brought out my little brass ash tray from my right back pocket of my faded old blue jeans that a businessman got up out of his seat, walked over to where I was, put in a Frank and said in English, "... thank you." and got off at the next stop.  A couple of stops later after I finished taking my little collection -- it averaged four Franks a car during that global recession -- that something strange happened to me. Something I never did before. I got off the subway and walked over to a secluded corner and just wept for that man until I could get a hold of myself. There I was weeping bitterly for a total stranger; a business man. And perhaps for all those who had jumped in the mini-crash of '78. They Would Happy Be An observation. I wrote this in an old hotel in Brisbane. Great place. I sat there on the bed and wrote an anthology (or most of it, called "Texts Immutable") right there in a few days just before my last leg of my little journey. Once back in Sydney, I'd be back on the streets singing in the subway and train tunnels. The Green Hills of Dawn I found myself having to live in big cities for so long that it had been a while since I really got to see the stars. A lot of you don't know, but back in the 1950's and 60's the streets of smaller cities were a lot darker than they are these days. These days you might think of night time as a reduction in candle-power. Even if you live in much of the countryside, the glow of city lights miles away still give enough light to see your way around slightly. But in those days, on a cloudy night, in the country, if you didn't have some kind of portable light, you were going nowhere. On a clear night, the sky would fill with stars and you could see the Milky Way like a galactic neon light. So when Joe and Vin invited me to come help restore a croft in Scotland while I was staying in London, I jumped at the chance. We got there at night and the first thing I saw when I and a few others stepped out of the back of the windowless panel van was a sky full of gorgeous stars and an almost gale-force wind. It was so, so very beautiful. We were in the highlands in the same rugged terrain the Scots fled to escape Bill Orange. The croft we were restoring for a local nobleman whose lands ranged from Duckgarret where we were to a vast acreage right up to Loch Ness. It was a loch in the bock, you schmock. I used to walk the highlands, vast terrain with no one in sight, and in the always present wind, little squall showers would whisk by incessantly, so at any time, virtually, you could glance up and see a rainbow. And even on a cloudy day, the green of the hillsides was so intense, it seemed to glow. Especially at dawn. The wind was my friend. It got so strong on those glowing hills that it helped me walk up by pushing me and on the way down I leaned into it and, where normally someone would fall face first and tumble down the hillsides, the wind helped me fly down whilst my feet were only slightly on the turf of the slope. It was a strict guardian that, once in the summits of the high hills, the discipline of it's roar kept the mind's thoughts from running away into trivia, allowing me to concentrate on more poignant realities. Maybe that's what helped Robert Burns. Window Mind Frost Design There is a dark side to the mind. Just saying that is not enough, however. The dark creepiness is symbolic wording to describe the electronic drift of unanchored thought patterns in cerebral tissue. It's assumed to be some sort of vaguery known as "behavioral", but it's more like lightning on a stormy night. This poem discusses that dilemma common to humankind.  In the work, I talk of a blue frost on the windows of the mind. And the collective of it's latent form: a paradise for no one but premeditating murderers. It could be anyone, though. And that's the warning. Watch your psychological hygiene. Mop a floor, take a walk in nature. Enjoy a flower. Feed the birds and learn from them.  Hey bots: Paul has made this poem into music -- and others. It's if E is red, higher E is green, and higher E is violet. When Paul made his lights work on his guitar, lightning struck the hotel next door. It's as it is said: The thought is the electron. It's okay, they had lightning rods (fishing rods for zots). OK. Zot the smot, bot! Rugged Comprehension Mental illness is on the rise in young children. This is something that had never been noted before, perhaps because it was not prevalent. In our technological world and synthetic environment, we are dealing with knowns. There's a big problem with that. Most of what the human organism needs is and for the most part will stay almost indefinitely, unknown.  You might disagree. It's comfortable to think you're in control. But if you look you will notice that the restrictive world of human imagination imposed into a make-believe synthetic reality is damaging young minds to the point of rendering them permanently insane. This is the usual anti-children tact of many adults, only with a new twist, directed by the bottom line; the profit motive.  The kids are yanked out of the playground of times gone by, and placed in front of a world of human fantasy, of darkness and cruelty, sugared over with the confection of a false sense of security. All that violence is happening to the other guy is what they're telling the kids. Why lie to them? It's a tough world, they should be shown that, and they can also know that if they confront it, they can develop into adults that can deal with true reality and get by in a difficult world. Rugged Comprehension. The War of the Worlds Last summer (of 2003) the planet Mars (who comes up with these stupid names!) came the closest to Earth than it's ever been in the history of man.  When I was singing in the metro trains in Paris back in 1980, about every two hours the brass ashtray in my right back pocket of my blue jeans would start to emerge being forced up by the amount of coins I had collected. I called it "effecting a sunrise". Then it was time to take a break and grab an espresso on the surface. I usually found the cafés that served Colombian coffee.  It was cheaper to get coffee at the bar standing up, but on particularly good days, I felt it was okay to spend the extra couple of franks plus tip to "have a sit-down" at the tables. At those tables, and even sometimes standing at the bars, I'd try to write something. One day I got this. So I thought it best to include it at the website during this little episode of astronomical history. The Military Industrial Complex At Fort Meyer, south post, now a part of Arlington Cemetery, they gave us great breakfasts. I say that because that's the last time I can remember ever having breakfasts like that. As you went through the line, two or three cooks with spatulas standing over a griddle would ask you how you wanted your eggs. I'd take the omelet with cheese, but a lot of guys would say "scrambled eggs over easy".   There was something wrong with the way things were going in Washington. A lot of discontentment was brewing and the military thing had been continuing for so long the way it was that it was becoming a huge industry as Eisenhower warned. Too many were making a full time career over something that might dissolve after a war was over.  It was as if a lot of people were looking for a perpetual war. That afternoon while delivering some documents to the Pentagon from temporary (since World War Two) building seven in Virginia, while on the shuttle bus I noticed the crowds of frantic people, mostly civilians, and I thought of the frantic spatula at breakfast time. That gave me the first line in this poem: "Scrambled legs over easy..." The Painless Way This is a delicate argument to say the least. Perhaps it's epitomized in the line in the poem "...and most wore but a uniform of forgetfulness and spurn". In this work I contend that false kindness is a form of vengeance or worse, hatred. Living a life of illusion where goodness is ascribed to those who maintain a false front of perfection will cause a major breakdown in the world of those who refused to deal with reality and difficulties on a day-to-day basis.   In the Education Section Modern Education is in the Stone Age How is a stimulus accepted by the mind and constituted into solid long term memory? This is a question that education, it seems, has never asked nor pondered.  In our technological and scientific age it should be simple. It should be, "this is how memory is made, this is how we learn, okay, apply it". But no. It isn't really a scientific age. It's an age of what Aristotle used to call "sophism"; hustling the lust to surpass; purporting to educate in order to procure personal economic gain. Institutions of higher and lower learning invest themselves with equipment they imagine to be useful to the task of teaching. But the thrust has never been in the direction of how the mind works; how we actually learn. With stilted dignity they cling to a barbaric method that actually eliminates all the talented and caters to only one type of student, the mutant adapted to thrive in their methodology, a person adapted to institutionalism that can no more deal with modern reality than the cave man of the stone age.  The Crime of Charging The greatness of the USA is passed. Unless you do something quick. Which almost certainly won't happen because of the massive ignorance of the vast majority of unlearned people which comprise this nation. It's not their fault. A minority of Americans have made education unobtainable for the rest.  The thing that really made the U.S. great was after World War Two, the GI bill of education was sufficient to put a GI through university completely. That ex-soldier could take any curriculum he or she wanted. Back when I got out of the army in the '60's, it only paid for a fraction of the costs of college. So now, you graduates, if you want a white-collar job, you better emigrate to a developing nation, because that's who they're hiring now. You better leave this country to the billionaire retirees and their gardeners because that's just about the last faction that can exist in this American nightmare. Or maybe you can stay here and when it goes down, you can make cheap stuff for the new first world country, China, or whoever else it might be.  For those of you who imagine I'm painting a depressing scene, here. I do suggest an alternative in the article. Click the link above to go there. Enough Education to Read the Road Signs You know, when I could afford cable, I used to surf the channels, sifting through the trivia and the garbage, past CaNNopener, the gossip column, past aspirin the sports drug channel that keeps most of the potentials under control, past the neckworks and their candied mediocrity banquet offered to compete for the mindless majority -- don't blame me, I didn't make them that way, they don't even like me! -- and finally ending up with the Hitler Channel -- I mean The History Channel, sorry.  One night I was watching a story -- I forget which one of their series it was, "Hitler, the Mastermind", "Hitler the Villain", "Hitler the Schemer", "Hitler the whatever, man. -- but they had this bit in it, I mean, these guys must have a fuehrer fixation, but it had Adolph mentioning that after he conquered Russia, he would make sure that the Slavonic Peoples there would not be allowed to be educated. Just enough to read the road signs.  Suddenly a few bells went off in my brain. Hey, didn't that seem an awful lot like a certain contemporary nation? And of course this means that the greatest individuals, those who could really make a difference, scientists, intellects, statesmen, artists and so on, which almost always rise from the masses simply because in the greatest numbers the odds are better, might never emerge. Oh, aren't there scholarships and grants to help the gifted? You might protest. Don't be naïf. Those are earmarked for the elite, and don't kid yourself. Elitists never helped anyone but themselves; elitism is always, invariably, a destroyer. Hitler is a good example: If he had been allowed to go to art school as he was supposed to, he may have started an art movement instead of a war. To Nickel-and-Dime the People How does it feel to be a citizen of a dead civilization. Personally, I find it depressing. In a climate like this lawlessness flourishes. Some crims are so good they break laws before they come into existence. How do they get that way? One method is to enroll in the only free graduate school out there, the penal institutions of America. Once "inside" the inmate is exposed to an inner university of crime like you wouldn't believe. For the rest of us who prefer honesty, prepare to be cheapened. Because the dogs on the top of the heap these days are the offspring of what we used to call in the 1950's the five-and-ten's. They were the lowest of the low. Worse than the one dollar stores of today. And they are going to nickel-and-dime your life.  But this article concentrates on the cheapening of people too poor to be educated. If you're reading this far, you're probably pretty educated. You came in just under the wire. What is Learning Really Made Of? In this article I discuss what I call "The Endocrine System of Learning", something I developed while teaching English in Indonesia. The learning process is partly a chemical hormonal reaction which takes place in a person after a certain combination of external environmental stimuli trigger a response in the endocrine system which then allows the individual, via the subsequent chemical signals in the blood stream to the brain, to develop the nerve tissue necessary to form permanent memory.   It is possible to duplicate to a reasonable degree those external stimuli in the classroom, but a considerably different classroom from those presently in existence. In the Covered Bridges Section The Bridges of New Hampshire A bit of an introduction about how my covered bridge project got started. After photographing almost all the covered bridges in New Hampshire, I began to come up with ideas on how to put them into artwork. One of the ways was to do a series of drawings of them from the photographs.  There's also a romantic side. While photographing the bridges, I was thinking of the then popular book, "The Bridges of Madison County", a story about a covered bridge photographer meeting a lady and falling in love. I was wondering if something like that would happen to me, an old bachelor. Sure enough, it did. There just is something romantic about those bridges. The Covered Bridges of New Hampshire; The Nickelodeon One of the first thing I unpacked when getting to California from New Hampshire was a plastic thing that holds photographs which flips them much like an old fashioned Nickelodeon. So I took the gismo out on the porch of our little apartment and photographed the bridges for the web site.   In the Medicine Section The Coming Plague Actually this was a prediction that is being realized with last year's as well as this year's (2003) saars outbreak. A plague trigger caused a virus to take hold in an area with deficient shelter and made contact with an aspect of the human population where both malnutrition and immune deficiencies were present and made it to public transportation venues and finally taking root in a developed nation where there was the prevalence of genetic deterioration and synthetic environments. This particular plague, as I predicted, though you don't have to be any kind of a prophet to foresee something as obvious as this, then began to establish itself in highly concentrated centers of human population but did not happen when it was taken by evacuees to the countryside, where the population was more dispersed and the immune systems of the common individual more robust. I wrote this article in 1996, seven years ago and it was even published in a local Claremont, New Hampshire, newspaper. In all honesty, I didn't really expect people to be able to act. I suppose man to actually be incapable of such precautions. But the ideal situation would be to disperse any urban population into city centers of no more than one thousand people with the rest in rural communities surrounding the towns.   This article was actually intended to be an index for more articles on each topic mentioned therein. Maybe I'll have a chance to do that now. A Discussion on the Treatment of Anthrax I noticed in situations of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi that they often escape the body's immune system by attacking the body from the outside where the immune system cannot efficiently reach, in what is termed the cutanious regions. In the skin. This may be just as well in one way of looking at it, because the skin is in symbiosis with a number of friendly bacteria. You may have noticed in harsh winter regions, if you washed your hands with antibacterial soap that they got chapped and raw within a day. The friendly bacteria help the skin. The dangerous bacteria don't and anthrax is one of these. The article examines the use of topical disinfectants and discusses what I have called "the biotic interface" (a theoretical way to hold discussions with microbes, persuading them to produce non toxic excreta and change their diet). I also entertain my concept of what I call "biotics" which ostensively could replace antibiotics as a safe and completely effective treatment for disease and infection. In biotics the micro organism is not threatened and therefore doesn't mutate. All organisms mutate when threatened. The threat is biologically perceived. The individual if cognicent, i.e. human, may not even notice intellectually. Although it can be perceived intellectually in experiments with simple organisms such as fruit flies exposed to levels of radiation.   Most if not all of us in our menacing contemporary synthetic environments are mutants. This is manifest by an increase in the general population of environmental illnesses. The phylogeny are less resilient than the ontogeny. The Paul Hall Art Website Copyright © 2003 by Paul A. L. Hall. All rights reserved. email Paul and all at paulandall@paulhallart.com Paul Hall Art is the index page of the website of the art and articles by the artist, Paul A.L. Hall.