FORTH GO

Ravi Shankar, his daugher Anoushka Shankar and a few supporting musicians performed at Memorial Hall on Tuesday night. There’s a decent review at IndyWeek for anyone wanting more sophistication. A local professor made introductions and explained the music as being romantic and added, “India is a very romantic country, as you can tell by the population.” The eight-year-old sitting next to me pondered that for a moment and then declared to her mother, “Oh, India is romantic so more people want to move there.”

The opening act was composed of four performers, with most of the action coming from a flutist and a drummer. I couldn’t see much movement from the other two, but they were apparently playing some kind of slow bass sitars. The wooden flute sounded a bit coarse at first as if resisting, but with lots of energy the flutist eventually won the battle and produced many flowing sequences of pure sounds. The most impressive thing about the drummer was the ability to produce so many sounds from a single drum. His hands each played at opposite ends of the drum simultaneously and with different beats.

Just like in this tame New York Times review from eight years ago, Ravi Shankar looked very frail coming out on stage and needed help getting set up, but after that he played energetically for the rest of the evening with his daughter playing at his side. Shankar was smiling, laughing, and playing very quickly toward the end. Both played sitars, with occasionally accompaniment from other musicians. They played only two long, continuous pieces. Though I wasn’t familiar with the music, I could recognize many sequences that are now embedded in Western guitar music. So maybe it’s true that Shankar is the “the godfather of world music,” as George Harrison called him.

For myself and others I talked to, the performance felt like it went by fast, but on checking the time afterwards, over two hours had elapsed. I wonder if the music had induced some kind of trance state that impaired our perception of time.

Memorial Hall did a great job at relaying the music to the audience. It was, however, annoying that they still haven’t convinced the audience not to keep checking cell phones or taking photos. I mean, how good a photo can you get anyway?

With my west coast cousin and fellow blogger and fiber artist coming this way for a big birthday celebration, I decided to make her a tie-dye T-shirt. Lee’s a quilter and her favorite color is brown, so that set the theme. I didn’t have any brown dye, which made for an extra challenge. I found two strategies on the web: one started with boiling walnut husks, and the other was to mix all the primaries together in some unspecified proportion. I also knew from my color science research for graph colors that brown was dark orange.

After trying a few test patches, I found two combinations that worked well and used them both. One was equal parts orange and black. The other was one part cyan, two parts magenta, and three parts yellow.

My first effort was to simulate a quilt with rectangular patches. This shirt uses both browns.

Next I tried to capture the eight-pointed star pattern I’ve seen in quilts. The eight wedges didn’t quite fill out into touching diamonds like planned, but it still made a nice flower. The blue is really a mix of a dark blue and a light blue, which is what produced the glow effect.

I still had some dye left over, so I made a couple more shirts for myself. The first takes advantage of the way the cyan and yellow bleed out of the CMY brown to produce a green halo. This shirt also employs six-fold symmetry, which was a little tricky.

Finally, I went with a basic horizontal stripe pattern using the orange brown.

I can definitely recommend the Red Stick Ramblers from New Orleans after seeing them play Saturday night at the Carrboro Arts Center. They put on a very lively show with many original songs plus a few standards. The crowd was small (100+) but enthusiastic with a dozen or so filling the dance floor for most songs. I’m told there was a good mix of waltzes and two-steps, but I wouldn’t know the difference.

Every band member excelled with their playing skills and vocals, but I thought fiddler Kevin Wimmer really stood out with some very smooth sounds coming from his fiddle. Guitarist Chas Justus was interesting to watch because of his perpetual friendly grimace. It was a treat to see a fiddlesticks [video] performance, which was new to me.

The extra ten t-shirts weren’t going to hold up for long with the soda ash on them, and fortunately Beth opened up her tie-dye studio/kitchen for a marathon dying session. It takes longer than expected to fold and tie the shirts and mix and apply the dye. I got 10 shirts done in about 6 hours, though I had to keep the patterns basic in the interest of time (and fatigue). 9 of the shirts came out pretty well.

The bottom three are my favorites. The yellow and periwinkle work pretty well together in the spiral, so my attempt at making orange by mixing red and yellow in situ didn’t quite work out.

I guess I’ll be wearing a lot of tie-dye this year.

Saturday, Beth and I traveled to Saxapahaw for a tie-dying session with fabric artist Jean Cerasani who teaches classes at the local Carrboro ArtsCenter among other places. I learned quite a bit and dyed four shirts, three of which turned out pretty good.

I was hoping that Jean would have some magical tie-dye tricks and came in wanted to do something out of the Mandelbrot set. The spiral was as close as I could get, using this Wikipedia image as inspiration. The middle shirt is supposed to be a sunflower — not bad, but room for improvement.

I like the third shirt best. The bottom dye was from dipping, so it’s more solid than usual. I was looking for a way to add some texture to it and Jean suggested thin dark stripes along the folds, which became dots when the shirt was unfolded.

The only problem is I still have ten more shirts treated with soda ash and ready for dye…