FRIDAY
>> Start the night off right at the DCist Happy Hour at 51st State. We’ll all be there to celebrate our nation’s veterans in the traditional manner: by drinking heavily.
>> Who doesn’t love a DJ who posts iPod playlists on the Internet so you can recreate a great night of dancing anytime, anywhere (especially when those playlists include choice selections like Kaiser Chiefs, The Rapture and James White and the Blacks)? Come celebrate the one-year anniversary of Bill Spieler’s Liberation Dance Party at DC9. Show up before 10 p.m. to avoid the $5 cover and get the cheaper drinks. You’ll be glad you did.
>> It may be a little tough (for obvious reasons) to get down to Jazz Fest in New Orleans this spring. In lieu of being there, you can at least get your Medeski, Martin and Wood fix on at 9:30 Club tonight for $25.
SATURDAY
>> There are those who will tell you that Tender Buttons, the latest album from Birmingham’s Broadcast, isn’t as polished or accessible as some of their previous outings. While these individuals would be technically correct, any attempt to extend this observation into some form of negative criticism would be dead wrong. “Tears in the Typing Pool” alone is worth the price of a ticket to Black Cat, and who in their right mind would pass up the chance to see them play “Black Cat” at Black Cat, anyway? With Gravenhurst and Tralala. $12, 9:30 p.m.
>> Love him or hate him, Dave Attell officially became a part of the larger popular culture when his Comedy Central Show Insomniac was on the air from 2001 to 2004. Never before had drunken buffoonery been celebrated with such zeal, and nakedly exposed as universally hilarious repugnant. The show is gone, but Dave is still out there, schlepping from hotel room to bar to hotel room, and tonight, he’s bringing his filthy mouth to American University (as if the institution hadn’t suffered enough indignities this year). 8 p.m., $25.
>> We mentioned the sold out The Black Keys show at 9:30 Club in the Weekly Music Agenda already, but allow us to point out that opening up for the outta Ohio blues-rock outfit is Detroit soul impresario Nathaniel “Nay Dog” Mayer (pictured). Mayer made a mark in the early 1960s with hits like “Village of Love” and “I Don’t Want No Bald-Headed Woman Telling Me What to Do.” Nowadays he’s come out of retirement and is touring in support of his latest effort, I Want to Be Held, and apparently, eating a lot of hot dogs. We would offer up $100 to snap a picture of him chowing down on a half smoke at Ben’s after the show, but that sounds a bit like fish in a barrel to us.
SUNDAY
>> 1979’s The Herd (Sürü in the original Turkish) is a masterpiece that is so rarely seen outside film school classrooms in this country that it is unknown even to some cinema freaks. Generally credited to screenwriter and Turkish superstar Yilmaz Güney (even though it was directed by the talented Zeki Ökten), The Herd follows a rural Kurdish family as they grapple with poverty and the ever-encroaching force of urbanization. It certainly has a bleak outlook: a traditional way of life, full of struggle, is ending, only to be replaced with a new one that is entirely different but equally unsustainable. The final scenes of the film, a collection of shots of glittering, commercial Ankara of the 1970s, are an eerie contemplation on a future that will undoubtedly be framed by the same sorts of betrayals and violent crimes perpetrated in the very scenes that precede them. At the Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium. 2 p.m., free.
