Thursday
Bourne Luckett-y
Remember how Matt Damon's character could speak, like, 60 languages in
The Bourne Identity
? Weren't ya jealous of that type of fluid fluency, how he could jump from German to Swiss to Russian and back again in the blink of an eye? Get ready to get jealous again when Erika Luckett takes the stage (in a benefit concert for Youth Shelter and Family Services). Luckett's tongue dances across the globe with Jason Bourne-like ease, from French to Spanish, Portuguese and English. Similarly, her songwriting, centered around her six-string prowess, reads like a travel brochure-New Orleans stomp, French ballads, Brazilian folk, all sung in a strong, sultry voice and a luminous sincerity. We all know we're on permanent vacation living here in Santa Fe, but why not take a trip and stamp your musical passport, and still get home in time to catch
Desperate Housewives
? (
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Friday
Brain Bucket Bash
There ain't a major, nor most probably a minor, culture on earth that doesn't have some kind of relationship to skull imagery, according to Cruz Gallery owner Richard Campiglio. True enough: From Vodou to Catholicism, decapitated and skinless heads pack a certain-ahem-bare bones appeal. Therefore, in a blissful amalgam of Day of the Dead, Halloween, All Saints Day and whatever other miscellaneous hoodoo that you do, Cruz is hosting
Skulls
, a jam-packed, largely open invitational exhibition of disembodied glory. It's a no-holds-barred type of affair so expect to find skulls in all media, size and species including human, kinda-human, mostly animal, definitely animal and pretty much alien, probably. Work by kids will hang, salon style, side by side with artists' in plentiful museum collections as a multitude of eyeless sockets gazes down upon what-if previous events at Cruz are anything to go by-is bound to be the best time to be had on Canyon Road. (
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Saturday
Bionic Ball
Does anyone recall
The Six Million Dollar Man
? How test pilot Col. Steve Austin is horribly injured, then rebuilt by Oscar Goldman and his team to be better, faster, stronger than before? Well, CCA Executive Director Steve Buck has too much hair to be Oscar Goldman, but he and his team have added some bionic bulk to CCA on a considerably trimmer budget. Next step is remodelling the warehouse space (closed last year by the fire marshal) into the super-powered artspace of the future. The best way to begin building that budget (again, damned reasonable compared to $6 million)? The annual auction and rip-roaring throwdown known as Beaux Arts, this year suitably monikered as Metamorphosis. Priced in two tiers, neither cheap, but with Bernadette Seacrest and The Yes Men crooning all night long and the opportunity to bid on everything from an Ed Ruscha to an Agnes Martin (with some Bruce Nauman, Bernar Venet, William DeKooning and Robert Indiana thrown in for good measure), there ain't a swankier way to blow those buckies. (
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Sunday
Anti-Britney Brit
Nicola Benedetti is the modern proverbial babe with brains. OK, we don't know a lot about her brain, but it's tough to deny that she's got a serious propensity for her violin. Having won Britain's 2004
Young Musician of the Year
competition-think
American Idol
for the BBC, but with, you know, good music-Benedetti's on a US tour, promoting the sentiment that classical music is hip, hot and heavenly-in a way that, say, Britney Spears just never will be-for the youngsters. In addition to her stable of awards with titles dripping buzzwords like "prodigy," the 17-year-old Scot's had a packed performance schedule for yonks and has already jammed with Luciano Pavarotti, dropped in on the London Symphony Orchestra and cranked out a few ditties for the Queen. Benedetti's Santa Fe Pro Musica recital comes with accompaniment from Alison Rhind on piano and includes Franck, Saint-Saens, Gershwin, Schubert, Debussy, Massenet and Wieniawski. (
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