An evening of silent films and slapstick comedy graces the Alden Theatre, featuring the Classics of the Silent Film: The FIRST Kings of Comedy. Screenings of Charlie Chaplin in The Pawn Shop, Harold Lloyd in High and Dizzy, Buster Keaton in The Goat, Charley Chase in Dog Shy, and Laurel & Hardy in You're Darn Tootin' will run with an introduction and commentary from film historian Bruce Lawton. 8 p.m. $10/$6.

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(Facebook/Atomic Music)

It's been a while since Washington was a guitar town.

From the sample-heavy club music of Thievery Corporation to burgeoning national hip-hop stars like Wale and Tabi Bonney to the Moombahton sound colonizing nightclubs around the world, the local music scene is far more friendly to laptop heroics than Marshall stacks these days.

But the instrument that first put D.C. music on the map of most rock fans in the '80s and '90s, from Fugazi to Clutch to the Dismemberment Plan, still has pride of place at Atomic Music, the long-running store for working musicians in Beltsville, Md. Rows of amps and a two-tiered wall of guitars, ranging from the familiar Stratocasters to off-beat, no-brand instruments, dominate the store.

Buying and selling secondhand instruments and accessories has been the store's focus since 1994, when co-owner Luis Peraza began selling his own collection with partner and fellow Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School grad Eric Schwelling. "I had a few guitars and he had credit — which I had none of," Peraza recalls. Their first store in College Park, founded when Peraza was 27, was about the size of the foyer of the current store.

Drummers and keyboardists can still find what they're looking for at Atomic, but the flip from Fugazi to Fat Trel hasn't affected the store as much as changes in the economy and technology. According to the National Association of Music Merchants, the recent recession caused U.S. sales of music products to fall from a10 -year peak of over $7.5 billion in 2005 to a low of under $6 billion in 2009.

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(AVA H Street/Facebook)

The H Street boom continues! Next up is "AVA H Street," an apartment complex at 318 I St. NE that's about to begin construction. Jeff Wood, development manager at Arlington-based AvalonBay, tells DCmud the hole's been dug, and that the 140-unit building is on schedule for December occupancy.

But, this being the fashionable H Street corridor, AVA H Street won't be anything like its buttoned-up counterparts in Northwest (yeah, I'm looking at you, Mt. Vernon Triangle). Instead, the building will have "colorful facades and prominent branding." In other words, you'll know it's the AVA because the word "AVA" will be plastered all over the façade, and highlighted with fluorescent green. Also, the building has a Facebook page, so obviously it's a hipster joint.

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Puccini's Il Trittico, a collection of three brief operas from the Royal Opera House, screens at "Opera in Cinema" at the West End Cinema. Sung in Italian, the stories Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi range from heartbreaking drama to satire. The Independent writes, "The accepted wisdom on Puccini’s trio of one-acters, Il Trittico, is that Gianni Schicchi is the masterpiece, Suor Angelica of very particular and questionable taste, with Il Tabarro, all shadow and melodrama, bringing up the rear." 7 p.m. Italian, subtitled. Tickets online.

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(Flickr/MJmerry)

The Daily Caller's seemingly endless series on conservative-media watchdog Media Matters for America, while largely met by silence or derision, prompted the Post's Erik Wemple to write:

If the Daily Caller really wants to call this an “investigation,” then the least it can do is a few searches on Google or Nexis... Why not just rely on the public record? Why not just look at a reporter’s clips and determine whether s/he overuses Media Matters material?

The Caller seems uninterested in Wemple's advice, preferring instead to hype its publication of a Media Matters memo it "obtained" — even though, as Dylan Byers notes, Politico published wrote about it nearly a year ago. So I've taken it upon myself to do the Caller's dirty work. Full disclosure: Best as I can recall, I have never received a single email for Media Matters, and the only time I've ever mentioned the liberal organization was to call its "Drop Fox" campaign "useless."

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Bethlehem, you've been Banksy'd. (Flickr/St. Dekker)

In divided nations, large murals and graffiti art are often a reminder of the oppression, violence and suffering the people have endured. In the West Bank barrier, for instance, Banksy depicted a girl frisking an Israeli soldier and a flak-jacketed dove in the crosshairs. William Parry documents such art, and his conversations with Palestinians, in a new book titled Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine, which he'll be discussing tonight at Busboys and Poets at (5th & K). Friday. 6 p.m. Free.

The rest of this weekend's events, after the jump.

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They play the rocks musics. (Facebook/Since Antarctica)

The music industry follows predictable cycles: Winter is a slow period for new album releases, but they pick up as the weather gets warmer. It's not quite spring yet, but there are a ton of new-release shows this weekend, proving that the album isn't dead yet — or, at least, that it doesn't take much to get bands to throw a party.

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(st-barths.com)

Buzzfeed broke the news yesterday — and, yes, get used to reading those words — that David Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media Company, is flying 20 senior executives and editors (plus their spouses) to a retreat at the "posh French Caribbean destination" of Saint Barthélemy, otherwise known as St. Barts. Bradley's paying for it himself, rather than using company funds, but still, "Editorial staffers being left behind on the St. Bart's trip grumbled to BuzzFeed that the money could be put to better use." Or perhaps they're just bitter that last year, their retreat was in Atlantic City.

But is a volcanic island resort in the Caribbean really that much better than the rundown gambling den of the "armpit of America"? Since I've been to neither place, there's only one way to find out: by comparing TripAdvisor's top 5 "things to do" for each location.

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Look out behind you! (Flickr/Barbara L. Hanson)

The Washington Post's On Parenting blog has always served as a practical guide for paranoid parents, and today it doesn't disappoint with "How to prevent TVs from falling on children," in which Janice D'Arcy writes:

It is heartbreaking any time a toddler gets seriously hurt or worse, but there is a special torture in knowing that a child’s injury could have been easily prevented.

One of the most common of these tragedies is when a television topples on a child. In recent months there’s been a rash of these deaths in the Chicago area. It has also occurred too many times in the D.C. region.

Go ahead and click through those links. The first one, despite its alarming language, isn't untrue (although this Sun article is more informative). But the second link takes us to a post on the WaPo blog The Crime Scene, "Baby injured by falling TV set." Note that word: injured. Not dead — and certainly no mention of deaths, plural.

Yes, it's quite possible that parents should do more to secure their TV sets, but D'Arcy needn't make this sound like an epidemic just to get her point across.

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(Facebook/Thang Le)

In this space, I was going to write about tonight's Vietnamese pop-up "Pho U" at Montserrat House. When he contacted me last week, Toki Underground chef Thang Le was excited to talk about the collaboration with Marvin chef James Claudio. But "Pho U" was postponed because, as Toki owner Erik Bruner-Yang confirmed to TBD, Le died earlier this week. Bruner-Yang said Le had been at Toki for six months, but declined to comment further, saying he wanted to respect the Le family's privacy.

Le and I weren't friends, not by the real definition of the word. We'd only met on a few occasions, and had one substantive conversation, at the Peregrine Espresso on 14th Street NW last month. It was windy and sunny that day, and he'd come from his apartment down the street. He told me about places where he'd worked — Komi, Hank's Oyster Bar, Iggy's in Singapore — and about his plans, such as starting a food truck with his brother.

Le had passion, and he was loved. I'd heard a lot about him, through mutual friends, before actually meeting him. They always referred to him as "du ma" — a Vietnamese insult that can also be a term of endearment — so when we finally met, I had to ask Le to remind me of his real name. (They'd given him that name over a decade ago, when he was an aspiring DJ, and it stuck.) The other night, some of those friends and I took a shot of Jameson in his honor. At 31, Thang Le left us too soon.

   

   

(Facebook/Thang Le)

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(Google+)

Aaron Morrissey, who stepped down as editor-in-chief of DCist in November, had himself a nice long holiday break. Now's he returning to work, as a Web producer at Atlantic Media Company's Think Custom Media division. He'll be supervising Web production for external clients, the first being Tennis Media Company — publishers of Tennis Magazine, tennis.com, and SMASH Magazine — which recently inked a multi-year parntership with Atlantic Media.

A posting for the position suggests Morrissey's responsibilities at tennis.com will be much as they were at DCist, with the possible exception of writing articles himself. He says he's starting soon, perhaps as early as next week.

"I'm really excited to be joining Think Custom Media and its dynamic team," he wrote in an email. "While it is a slight departure from my previous work at DCist, I'm really excited to stretch my legs and apply the editorial lessons I've learned to something new."

So this was the "very important phone call" Morrissey was awaiting yesterday. Congratulations to my occasional drinking buddy (yes, that's my disclosure). I know he'll have much more success at Atlantic Media than Arsenal had against AC Milan.

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K.Flay

Rapper and producer K.Flay looks more like an indie-rock chick than someone who spits rhymes. The electronic/hip-hop artist uses rhymes as a "sonic technique," writes the New York Times. "She represents a generation of white kids who grew up with hip-hop but who weren’t obsessed with it so they feel rhyming is theirs to use without needing to pay homage to the culture." She told Spin her latest EP, Eyes Shut, which was recorded on a coffee high, is "about wanting to float away, but also wanting to tie rocks to your shoes." She performs with Cheyne and Gage at DC9. 8:30 p.m. $10/$12.

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If at any time since 2004, you've paged through the classifieds in the Washington City Paper or sipped a beer at Clarendon's Galaxy Hut, you've seen comics-style art by illustrator Ben Claassen III.

While Claassen writes and publishes a new comic strip every week, some of the paintings just taken down and replaced with new ones at the Galaxy Hut have been up for nearly eight years.

"I remember making them in the basement of a group house I lived in in Hyattsville," Claassen wrote in an email.

That house was called the Dirtfarm, which became the name for the series of comics he conceived that today runs in several alternative newsweeklies.

Claassen and Galaxy Hut owner Lary Hoffman originally agreed that his pieces, which depict stick-figure characters from his comic strips in sweetly depressing situations, would hang until sold. Whenever a painting went out the door, Hoffman required a new one be put in its place.

Over the years, though, inquiries about purchasing the paintings begin to pile up in Claassen's inbox, and he "just couldn't keep up." The old paintings maintained their spots on the bar walls for years.

"I got overwhelmed with a good many other things, and after a point didn't even know how to respond to the emails — many, many of which I still haven't responded to. Pretty bad, eh?" Claassen said.

Now that his latest pieces, which debuted at the bar on Monday, are on display, Claassen can finally work on selling the old ones.

"I'm figuring on going back to the earliest of the emails and offering them to whoever wrote to me first about each of them. If any of them are still left unsold after that, I figure I'll add them to the Web store on my site," he said.

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Dear Jim Irsay,

This must be a very difficult time for you, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts. You have one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time, a holder of myriad records who brought your city its first Super Bowl victory and who, everyone seems to agree, is a nice (and occasionally funny) guy. Last July, you rewarded the future Hall of Famer with a five-year, $90 million contract. But then a neck injury forced him to miss last season, and your team performed so miserably as to earn the top pick in the NFL draft, which surely will be Stanford's Andrew Luck, one of the most promising college quarterbacks since — well, since Manning.

Some pundits think you should start Manning next season and groom Luck, but a growing chorus of sportswriters say it's "a virtual certainty" you're going to release Manning, which will cost you tens of millions but also save you tens of millions more, and let some other team take the risk on a 35-year-old QB with a tweaked neck. I beg of you, please, don't consider it another minute. Do it right now — and not as a courtesy to Manning, or so your team and its fans can move forward, but rather for all of us here in Washington, D.C., who can't bear to read one more article in the Washington Post about Peyton Manning definitely, possibly, maybe, conceivably wearing a Redskins uniform next season.

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It's probably fitting that a movie depicting perhaps our greatest president as a vampire hunter would also take its liberties in depicting Washington, D.C. Behold, the first trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is based on a book partly set in Washington but that was shot in New Orleans. (The D.C. film office had hoped that the production would film here for two days last summer, but as far as I know, that never happened. I'm awaiting confirmation.)

So what's in the trailer below? A score that sounds like Inception — you know, that foghorn sound — remixed by the Crystal Method. A gruff voice that couldn't possibly be Lincoln's, since his was "high keyed, unpleasant." Oblique camera angles. The sun setting behind the Washington Monument. A slow-motion fight involving lots of drapery. The West Lawn of the Capitol Building covered with thousands of people dressed in earth tones (which had become all the rage after a famously controversial fashion spread in Harper's Magazine). And lastly, finally, what everyone came to see: people being hacked to death by a former president.

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Flickr/Pen Waggener

The origins of Valentine's Day are "shrouded in mystery." In the early Roman days, men used to hit on women by actually hitting them. So forgive me if I don't consider the day such a big deal. As someone who was single for most of her life, I often forget Feb. 14 even exists, since it's never served a purpose beyond parties in elementary school. Meanwhile, it makes messes of men who are in relationships. Between those with high-maintenance girlfriends who want the world, and the girls who say the day doesn't matter to them (but it really does), it's a wonder anyone celebrates it at all.

In this special edition of our daily events roundup, we've included two Valentine's Day stories from contributors that are sure to melt your heart. (No, not really.)

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Galaxy Hut hosts a Dirt Farm Valentine's Day featuring new works by satiric comic-strip artist Ben Claassen, whose works appear in City Paper and the Examiner. The Arlington venue, which already features his paintings on the walls, is replacing them with a bunch of new paintings. The night also features music by The Torches and Third Channel, and Baltimore stand-up comedians Mickey Free and Ellie Beziat. 8 p.m. $5.

POETRY

For the haters. Mothertongue Anti-Valentine's Day Slam features a night of spoken word at Black Cat. 8 p.m. $8.

THEATER

What would you do to make it? How far would you go? Is the enterprise of American capitalism working? In Civilization (All You Can Eat), six professionals living in the city fight to make it to the top. Jason Grote's satiric play opens at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Tickets online.

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It's an Oscar weekend. West End Cinema and E Street Cinema are holding screenings of the short film nominees in live action, animation and documentary categories.

Animation-nominee The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris, inspired by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton and The Wizard of Oz, is a must for lovers of books and whimsy. A Morning Stroll chronicles a New Yorker's morning walk by a strutting chicken. And Dimanche/Sunday is set during an ordinary Sunday in a small village as a train rumbles through, rattling tea cups and ironing boards. Live-action nominee The Shore, set in Ireland, is about two childhood friends, Joe and Paddy, reuniting after 25 years. Friday. Live Action and Animated Shorts screening at E Street Cinema/Documentary shorts screening at West End Cinema.

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Stefanie Ambrose of Alleghany St. (Facebook/Alleghany St.)

This weekend is full of sold-out shows: All the tickets to the 9:30 Club — for Rebirth Brass Band, Jack's Mannequin, and Die Antwoord — have been scooped up, and you're also out of luck for much-hyped Sharon van Etten and Shearwater show at the Black Cat. With concerts at the most popular venues out of the question, it's time to seek out more unusual spaces.

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In the 20's and 30's the U Street corridor was known as "Black Broadway," an epicenter for theater, jazz and blues at places like Lincoln Theater and Bohemian Caverns, frequented by the likes of Duke Ellington. The D.C. Hip Hop History Project records its live podcast, Black Broadway: The Roots of D.C. Hip Hop, at the Dunes tonight, with moderators James Benson and Kokayi. The panel discussion features singer-songwriter-actor-poet W. Ellington Felton, Luke Stewart, editor of Capital Bop, blues musician Stacy Brooks, and DJ's Alizay and RBI. Cornel West Theory and Nappy Riddem perform. The Dunes. 7 p.m.

After the jump: Charlie Chaplin and baked goods.

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