The Santa Fe Art Institute has put together an ambitious program of exhibits, workshops and lectures centered around explorations of sound and light in contemporary art. Called Transmit+Transform, the program will present a series of provocative events through October of this year.

Paul Slaughter

The 2004 Santa Fe Opera Season

Unlike, say, pizza, opera is an acquired taste. Very few people pop out of their mamas' wombs and immediately start grooving to Puccini. It just doesn't work that way. Like many of the very best things in life, you have to put forth a considerable amount of effort to make sense of opera's odd little complexities. A little knowledge and experience, however, can quickly turn it into a bona fide addiction.

"Conflict and Resolution" by Hazel Orr

New Grounds Print Workshop and Gallery

A new exhibit opening this week at New Grounds Print Workshop and Gallery (3812 Central SE) presents art by two complementary artists whose work explores stylized geometric spaces. Hazel Orr's lush red-toned monotypes are loosely inspired by the colors and architectures of Morocco, Italy and Spain. Neil Bell's equally abstract etchings seem to exist in a limbo between two- and three-dimensional space. Their joint show opens this Friday, July 2, with a reception from 5 to 7:30 p.m. and runs through July 31. For details, call New Grounds at 268-8952.

"Spong Roots and Central Court, Ta Prohm, Angkar, Cambodia" by Kenneth Parker

Marigold Arts

Kenneth Parker's large-scale colored landscape photographs are snapped during week-long backpacking trips in which he lugs 75 to 80 pounds of heavy camera equipment into some of the most remote regions on Earth. The results, of course, are often spectacular. Over the last three decades, Parker has managed to compose some of the most eye-popping images of the natural world I've ever seen. An exhibit of landscape photographs from Asia opens Friday, July 2, with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. at Marigold Arts in Santa Fe. Light Over Ancient Asia runs through Aug. 3. (505) 982-4142.

Back in the 1500s, St. Teresa de Avila succumbed to a mystical vision of a crystal palace with seven chambers, each signifying a step on the path to complete communion with God. Teresa recorded her vision in The Interior Castle, a book that's been recognized as one of the world's great spiritual classics for almost five centuries.

Barbara Vine is the pen name of British author Ruth Rendell, a psychologically subtle mystery writer known for relentlessly tightening the screws of interior dread. Instead of staging a Texas chainsaw jamboree, The Blood Doctor, recently released in paperback, uses the history of research into hemophilia to explore a character cursed with "a passion for blood."

When Wilson, a career diplomat, publicly pointed out the ridiculousness of Bush's claims that Saddam had attempted to buy uranium from the African country of Niger, the administration went on the offensive in the most heinous manner. The Justice Department is currently investigating just who exactly betrayed Wilson's wife's identity as a CIA operative, a betrayal that cost her her career. Wilson tells his side of the story in this important memoir.