Flappy Bird: In Memoriam

We hardly knew you, Flappy Bird. It’s been just over a week since you first began to pump your little wings on my iPhone, and just like that your creator has returned you to a cage, calling you “addictive” and “a problem.” I know why the caged bird sings, Maya…

Have a Heart and Make One at West Elm

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…

Delilah Buitron on The Rise of Flamenco, Her Career and Dallas’ DNA

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…

Death and the Powers: Robots Are Coming. And They Can Sing.

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…

I Went to the Theater and Left With Blood On My Pants

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…

Perot Museum Extends Animal Inside Out to February 23

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…

Love of a Certain Age

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…

Ride that Twain

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…

Not Monumental

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…

The Lego Movie Really Snaps Together

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…

Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel: A Marzipan Monstrosity

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…

Vampire Academy Gets Teen Girls Right (Unlike Twilight)

“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…