FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY HAD AN ACTIVE IMAGINATION BUT HE PROBABLY NEVER IMAGINED THIS: a musical version of his seminal work, Crime and Punishment, performed with seven actors and three improvisational jazz musicians. But this is exactly what Ten Thousand Things Theater Company is doing, and they’re doing it in prisons, homeless shelters, and other low-income centers. The company has never shied away from…

WHEN NOTORIOUS INDUSTRIAL AUSTRALIAN BAND SPK TOURED THE US IN 1982, they subjected their audiences to a barrage of excruciatingly loud, non-musical, electronic noise. The three men performed before a 20-foot screen on which played footage of a severed human head performing oral sex on a dead body. One member of that band, Graeme Revell, went on to become a successful Hollywood soundtrack composer…

An iChat by artist Ruben Nusz with VenaAmbrose (Mpls), Sayre Gomez (LA), Justin Schaefer (Mpls) and J. Patrick Walsh III (NYC), the artists behind Caprice, an upcoming installation and exhibition at Art Of This Gallery opening May 9 and on view through May 30. ruben: Thanks to everyone who’s participating in this five-way chat. Please answer my questions at your leisure. Let the conversation flow naturally…

I THINK WE’RE ALL FILMMAKERS, I REALLY DO. We may not all be great at it, but people are just born with a narrative sensibility. It used to be that if you gave kids a Super-8 camera and some greasepaint, they would make their own monster movies in the backyard. Nowadays, children shoot short narrative features on their digital cameras and post them to YouTube; and adults do, too. When I last saw…

IN NATIONAL MONUMENTS, POET HEID E. ERDRICH documents the strange case of Nefertiti, an ancient Egyptian queen acclaimed as the “most beautiful woman in the world” after Ludwig Borchardt’s 1912 excavation of her ravishing likeness, in the form of a sculpted head, from the sands of Tel-el-Amarna. Wife of Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother to Tutankhamun (a.k.a. King Tut), Nefertiti bore many titles…

mnLIT is a competitive literary program presented by mnartists.org, in collaboration with Magers and Quinn Booksellers, which consists of the What Light Poetry Project and the miniStories flash fiction series. mnLIT showcases original work by Minnesota poets and writers and is sponsored, in part, by The Onion/The Decider.Interested writers are welcome to submit work for consideration in both the…

THE THEME FOR THIS YEAR’S MSPIFF IS CHAOS, AS IT ALWAYS IS. At a movie on Friday, I overheard this conversation: If you went to St. Anthony Main last Friday, you don’t need me to tell you that the lobby was filled with people milling about in confusion. There seemed to be three lines, none of which were clearly marked; patrons wandered aimlessly from one line to the next, not sure where they were…

MINNEAPOLIS IS, AS PEOPLE SAY, A COOL PLACE. The literal cool, by keeping the cost of living low for a major metropolitan area, attracts the metaphoric cool — artists. Some artists are born here, some roll in from surrounding states, and some fly in at random, like spider hatchlings, but Minneapolis also attracts a disproportionately high number of ex-New Yorkers. The latest to get off the merry-go-round…

THE MINNESOTA BOOK AWARDS GALA MAY NOT BE AS SPLASHY AS THE IVEYS (the annual awards ceremony for theater folk) or as avant-garde as the Sage Awards (which honors local dancers), but this annual ceremony is an eloquent testament to the depth and breadth of literary life in the Twin Cities. Some fun facts: We are consistently ranked within the top three most literate cities in the country — Minneapolis…