My informal experiment is to see the effects of applying the soda ash before or after folding or not at all. Here are the results of four spirals:

Soda Ash – Tie – Dye
The first brown-red spiral is my usual technique of soaking in soda ash solution before folding. It gets good dye coverage, but looks a little blocky in places. On reason I like this order is that soaking after tying sometimes loosens the folds/knots.

Dampen – Tie – Soda Ash – Dye
This is the Paula Burch technique, since it is safer not to handle the treated fabric. The effect is more pronounced since both the soda ash and the dye are constrained by the tying; however, there is less dye coverage.

Dampen – Tie – Dye
Skipping the soda ash produced a nice pattern, but the colors (brown and periwinkle) already look faded and I suspect they will fade quickly over time. On the other hand, you can view the colors as nicely mellowed.

Tie – Dye
Dry cloth produced bulky folds and really soaked up the dye. The green did not “mellow” well for whatever reason, possibly unrelated to the technique.

This photo is a my recollection of the shirts I wore, in the approximate order. I’m sure, at least, of the three red, white, and blue shirts worn before, on, and after Independence Day. Next year I’ll try to get a photo of myself each day for a definitive record.

18 Tie-Dye Shirts

In spite of the book’s theme, Tom Peters decided to show off his foresight:

I can’t imagine a scenario where Apple is a leader twenty years from now. Maybe it will be ten times bigger … but setting the agenda? That’s an insane thought.

The book has a copyright date of 1993, so the interview must be from about twenty years ago.

Being in the data visualization business, I can’t help but see lots of familiar and new plots:

If there was a story or theme, I missed it. Instead, I only saw two and half hours of high-energy dancing. It seemed that each dancer was always doing at least two of the following things at once: hopping feet, swinging hips, rolling bellies, shimmying shoulders, articulating arms, and twirling bodies. Two different troupes represented two different styles of costumes and dance, cabaret and tribal, though there were plenty of costume variations throughout the night for all dancers. The music seemed to be a surprising mix of Indian/Arabic songs and electronic techno music, except for a live solo drummer who supported a few pieces.

My favorite dances were those with veils. It was amazing how many captivating visuals could be produced by the swirling veils.

The crowd was mostly women, who were constantly offering up enthusiastic shrill howls I later learned were called zaghareets. And strangely enough, less than 24 hours later my ears were again bombarded with zaghareets from the crowd at the Sanity Rally. One more occurrence and it may have qualified as Jungian Synchronicity.

I wasn’t familiar with the play, and I had a hard time following the dialog since it was in the original Shakespearean English. Here’s the first sentence as a witness:

As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion
bequeathed me by will but poor a thousand crowns,
and, as thou sayest, charged my brother, on his
blessing, to breed me well: and there begins my
sadness.

I guess it’s not legitimate to complain about the language of a Shakespeare play, but it did take away from my appreciation. I’m sure there was a lot of wit in the text that was lost on me. I was expecting the language style could be updated while maintaining the cleverness.

Without the wit, the simple plot was not enough to hold interest. Fortunately, the staging of the play was very good. The set was simple, versatile and high quality. The acting was fine as far as I could judge. I was most impressed with the physical advancement of the story, with active fight scenes and silent communications via gesturing. I wonder how much of that is standard or new to this production.

Sitar

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?