West Elm is hosting “Craft a Work of Heart” from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at Mockingbird Station benefiting St. Jude Research Hospital in Memphis. Here’s the deal, for every paper heart created, West Elm will donate $1 to St. Jude’s. Their goal is to “set the world record for…
Valentine’s Day aside, The Rise of Flamenco would be a sexy way to spend any Friday night. Lucky for romantics, Orchestra of New Spain, Dallas Flamenco Festival and Danielle Georgiou Dance Group collaborated on a show for this weekend, just in time to save your previously lackluster dinner plans. This…
The lowly writer always seems to be on the bottom rung of the Hollywood food chain. They craft worlds and characters using nothing but their minds, a bottomless pot of extremely strong coffee and a social phobia that makes them hyper-vigilant of human behaviors and emotions. Then it slowly gets…
Robert Orth is splayed on his back, flailing his arms and legs from side to side with big, heavy flops. “Rememmmmberrr!” he wails in a rich, lyrical voice. “The memory chamber! Touch, too much. Too much unremembered!” He uses his legs to drag his body across the floor of the…
It’s cold outside, but it’s time to snap out of that video game coma and break out of hibernation because signage for Jaws and a giant TARDIS outside the Irving Convention Center in Las Colinas can only mean one thing: Sci-Fi Expo 2014! So, burrow out of that cozy blanket…
For weeks after Heath Ledger’s body was found in an apartment in New York City in 2008, curious folks would come into the store in SoHo where I worked and ask, “Do you know where Heath’s building is?” Of course I knew where it was; everyone who worked or lived…
Shows like This American Life pride themselves on telling true, honest-to-God stories about the average American that hold nothing back. However, even their subjects must keep some details and plot points in the furthest quadrants of their minds, so it doesn’t come close to flying out of their mouth. Kevin…
My sister and I are standing in line at the bar just outside the theater when across the room a pay phone rang. I remember whispering something to her like, “You go answer it.” Of course, she refuses. Because she’s a spoilsport and because we are almost at the front…
When Frank Campagna opened Kettle Art in Deep Ellum 10 years ago, it was one of three storefronts on Elm Street. The vision was simple: a gallery dedicated to the art of local artists, no exclusive agreements required. It’s been a rocky road to improvement for the neighborhood, but a…
If you haven’t been to the Animal Inside Out exhibit at the Perot Museum yet, or if you’d like to go see it again, you’re in luck: The Perot Museum has extended the exhibit until February 23rd. Before you go, here’s a reminder of the exhibition rules. I like to…
We’ve entered an age in which people have no idea how old they are. Fifty-year-olds lament, “I still feel 30 in my mind,” and sometimes dress like it. Some 30-year-olds may cling to the destructive habits of their 20s, but plenty more march dutifully into full-on family-and-career-building mode, perhaps acting…
Tom Sawyer was quite the little pickup artist. “D’ya like dead rats?” he says to the new girl in town, Becky Thatcher. She doesn’t, but she does take a shine to Tom, America’s pre-Bart Simpson symbol of boyhood mischief. Be re-introduced to Tom and his dead-rat-and-dead-cat-swinging pals Huck Finn, Joe…
Dallas Theater Center’s artistic director Kevin Moriarty loves big-budget visual gimmickry, but for Oedipus el Rey, playwright Luis Alfaro’s contemporary adaptation of the 2,500-year-old Greek myth, now running in the Studio Theatre at the Wyly, he’s held his usual instincts in check. Instead of tatting things up, Moriarty and his…
Art may not be more important than human lives. But on the list of things that mean something to human lives, across centuries, it ranks pretty high. That’s what’s so compelling about the story of the Monuments Men, a group of people from 13 nations who volunteered to protect cultural…
Consider the Lego, the toy of contradiction. With one — well, with hundreds of them — you can build anything: houses, airplanes, house-airplanes. You can even build something that will change the world, as Larry Page and Sergey Brin did in 1996 when they housed the server for their new…
How retrograde are many of the core tenets of the Disney princess? Consider this: My daughter owns a book called Snow White’s Secret, in which Disney’s royal archetype reveals her devilish hidden life: When the Dwarfs are working at the mine, she sneaks into their cottage and joyfully cleans the…
Greetings from the 64th annual Berlin Film Festival, where it’s a surprisingly balmy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). The weather here may not be business as usual, but the festival looks promising — the competition includes films by Alain Resnais, Lou Ye, Yoji Yamada, and Claudia Llosa (whose odd…
“Goodbye Facebook, goodbye iPhone — Hello Saint Vladimir’s,” groans dropout Rose Hathaway (Zoey Deutch) when she and her best friend, Lissa (Lucy Fry), are dragged back to the titular school they ditched when they ran away to live normal-ish lives in Portland. Despite their year outside the gates, human culture…
The big news out of the Berlin Film Festival earlier today was that Shia LaBeouf, here to promote Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac: Volume 1, behaved like an ass on the red carpet at the movie’s premiere last night. He showed up in a proper tuxedo, but also with a paper…
For Xchange, the Nasher’s citywide public art project, only two locals were selected to create work. One was solo artist, activist and Observer Mastermind winner Vicki Meek. The other was Good/Bad Art Collective, a group of wonderfully peculiar souls. Their work/play attitude and hyperactive creativity led to some of Denton’s…
One of the primary advantages animation has always had over live action film is its ability to depict anything imaginable without concern for budget, temperamental actors or the audience’s capacity to suspend disbelief. Anyone with rudimentary equipment and the patience to sit alone in the dark for weeks on end…
The silly time of year when love goes to our heads is upon us. We exit football season, wipe the wing sauce off our mouths and then ante up for all things romance as that most corporate of holidays bears down upon us, drowning us in artificially preserved candy hearts…
