Tapestry

Did she know it was a sin to sleep with the village priest? And another sin, adultery, to sleep with him while she was married? And a third sin, incest, because he was her blood relation? No, the young woman told the Inquisitor, a bishop. "I did not think I was sinning. It gave us both great joy.... Our joy was shared," she said naively, as if the mutuality would absolve them.

Indian singer Shweta Jhaveri's concert at the Skirball Center on Friday was an impressive transformation of the concept of world music fusion. There have been plenty of shotgun marriages between Indian classical music and American pop and jazz in the past, but Jhaveri opted instead for a musical love affair, for a coming together without precondition.

In a gallery beneath the 13th century belfry tower that dominates the storybook streets here, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony on Friday presided over the unveiling of monumental tapestries designed by a California artist and produced by Belgian craftsmen for Los Angeles' new cathedral. Brugge is as Old World as Los Angeles is New World. A medieval gem with a population of about 110,000, it has canals instead of freeways and a cityscape that is a pedestrian's dream.

Manil Suri, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, has created a world within a world with his debut novel, "The Death of Vishnu" (Harper Audio; unabridged fiction; eight cassettes; seven hours; $39.95; read by John Lee). Shading his novel with a sly comic undertone, the Bombay-born author created a microcosm of modern-day India within the walls of a middle-class apartment building.

Philip Glass understood the risk of joining the frenzy to churn out music for the millennium. Then add the risk inherent in describing a piece as "5,000 years of human meditation on eternity." And then pile on the risk of equating sections of the Koran with the Mayan creation myth and, yes, the Bible too. "It always comes up, 'Isn't this a danger? Isn't that a danger?' And it's all true," Glass says. "But you don't want to not be invited to the party."

If two young white kids who look like clean-cut grad students are going to call their band the North Mississippi Allstars and draw on the primal African American blues of that rural area, they'd better be good. They are. At times at the Troubadour on Monday, guitarist Luther Dickinson and his drummer brother Cody, with bassist Chris Chew, showed a stunning mastery of the raw rumble of the late legend Mississippi Fred McDowell and his more recent "discovery," R.L. Burnside.

At work since 1973, Mary and Sal Fasulo have almost finished a 7-by-10-foot medieval tapestry. On a trip to Hearst Castle 17 years ago, they saw the tapestry "La Fleur Mille" hanging in the billiard room of the mansion. It inspired the couple to try to create a needlepoint re-creation. Using a postcard of the original as a guide, they got to work. "You have to finish what you start," she said. "But a lot of living goes on in 30 years."

The Kobe Bryant supernova hit the NBA finals, at full force, Wednesday, leaving everyone else shuddering in the aftermath, and sifting through the outer limits of the basketball cosmos. How long will he burn, how bright the blast, and how many opponents will be consumed by the flame? "I can feel it kind of blossoming," said Bryant's high school coach, Gregg Downer. "I mean, in the next eight to 10 years, we're looking at four or five titles. "I think Kobe would expect that.

The tradition of weaving among the Zapotec Indians from the state of Oaxaca goes back more than 2,000 years. The glorious colors, imaginative designs and fine texture of their hand-spun tapestries are testament to the months and months of hard work it can take to complete just one rug or wall hanging. To dye 1 pound of yarn to a reddish hue, for instance, requires the larvae from about 700,000 cochineal insects plucked from the agave cactus.