SATURDAY: Yes, Hermione, there is a wizard-rock festival. Fans of Harry Potter and his adventure are hereby summoned to get their magic on this Saturday at Sonorus, "Virginia's first wizard-rock festival." We can't vouch for the quality of music from the bibbering Humdingers, Madame Pince and the Librarians, the Chocolate Frogs and Snidget, but, uh, you won't have seen anything like it.
» Jammin Java, 227 Maple Ave. E., Vienna, Va.; Sat., Feb. 6, 11:30 a.m., $20; 703-255-5566.
SUNDAY: Avant-garde is all about the new, but the Residents have stayed on the cutting edge of noise-rock since the 1960s.
The four group members create art and play music, although they don't consider themselves a band in the "How ya' doin', Detroit!" sense and the membership might be fluid as well. It's hard to tell truth from fiction when it comes to these anonymous pranksters; just enjoy the show.
» 9:30 Club, 811 V St. NW; Sun., Feb. 7, 7 p.m., $25; 800-955-5566. (U St.-Cardozo)
THIS WEEKEND: Many artists responded to Sept. 11, but trust New York-based choreographer Mark Morris to construct one of the most thoughtful and focused such works.
Mark Morris Dance Group performs "V," along with "visitation," set to music by Beethoven, and "Empire Garden," with music by Charles Ives, at George Mason University's Center for the Arts this weekend.
» Center for the Arts, Route 123 & Braddock Road, Fairfax; Fri. and Sat., Feb. 5 and 6, 8 p.m., $22-$44; 888-945-2468.
FRIDAY: Summer comes to Annapolis for just one night when Buckwheat Zydeco sheds sunshine and heat in the Rams Head Tavern. The band, headed by the eponymous accordion whiz, rips through its repertoire — an irresistible mix of rock, blues, Creole music and that indefinable Southern Louisiana strut — on Friday.
» Rams Head Tavern, 33 West St., Annapolis; Fri., Feb. 5, 8 p.m., $22; 703-255-1900.
SINCE THE 1970s, prog pioneers Yes have been just as famous for their lineup changes as they have for their challenging mix of classical and rock elements. Members come and go, sometimes staying only for an album or tour before moving on to solo projects or new configurations like Asia or Anderson, Buford, Wakeman & Howe. Debating the merits of a particular lineup has become a heated pursuit among fans.
The mercurial nature of Yes means that its catalog, which consists of nearly twenty studio albums as well as numerous multi-disc live sets, is incredibly varied, ranging from '60s folk to classic(al) rock to synth pop.
"There's a whole wealth of material there," says bass player Chris Squire. "Of course a lot of that has been due to the different musicians who've been in the band at different times and have moved the band this way and that way."
Yes is perhaps most widely known for its fluke radio hit "Owner of a Lonely Heart" in 1983, but more than a decade before, it mixed rock 'n' roll spirit with classical chops to create an ambitiously symphonic pop full of extended song suites and lengthy solos.
THE SCENE IN New Brunswick, New Jersey, is literally underground. The suburb, which lies just 30 miles southwest of New York City, has no underage venues, so young punk bands organize and plays shows in the basements across town, creating one of the strongest DIY communities in the country.
The scene has launched several cult groups, including the Bouncing Souls and Thursday, and the next big New Brunswick band may be the Screaming Females, a trio that went from playing raucous basement shows to opening for Throwing Muses and the Dead Weather.
Intensely loud yet inventively melodic, the band actually includes only one female and two males: Marissa Paternoster not only screams, but shreds mightily, while drummer Jarrett Dougherty and bass player King Mike constitute a rhythm section that is both tight and heavy.
"For the first year we were a band," says Dougherty, "I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the shows we played were in New Brunswick basements. It exposed us to people playing styles of music that we might not otherwise have heard."
WHEN A CHARACTER in Norman Corwin's historical play "The Rivalry" bemoans the conflation of politics with corporate interests, a chuckle rises out of the Ford's Theatre audience.
Part of the play's charm comes from the Washington-ness of it all. The play centers on the legendary debates between Stephen Douglas (Rick Foucheux) and Abraham Lincoln (Robert Parsons) in their 1858 race for senator of Illinois, hearkening back to a (supposedly) more civilized era.
Full of soaring rhetoric over questions of slavery, morals and the union's cohesiveness, the bulk of the play takes place on the debate stage. But Corwin also pays attention to his famous characters' private lives.
AH, FEBRUARY, WHEN a young man's thoughts lightly turn to the buying of flowers and chocolates, and then darkly turn to the prospect of being dragged to some paint-by-numbers rom-com. Fortunately, AFI Silver offers a few Valentine viewing alternatives with its "Screen Valentines: Great Movie Romances" series.
It starts off old-school this weekend with 1938's "Bringing Up Baby," one of the best of the rapid-fire screwball comedies and certainly the only one starring a Brontosaurus skeleton and a leopard (the titular Baby). The bones, the beast and the boy (Cary Grant) are playfully tormented by loopy free spirit Katherine Hepburn, who seems to be improvising constantly. It's hard to believe this was her big comedic debut, and even harder to believe that Grant's line, "I just went gay all of a sudden!" made it past the censors.
If you like your movies newer but your stories older, Ang Lee's costume drama "Sense and Sensibility" has several love stories, Hugh Laurie surliness, plus (spoiler alert) a double wedding. As Emma Thompson quietly loves a relatively non-bumbling Hugh Grant, brash young Kate Winslet upbraids her with the line: "Can the soul really be satisfied with such polite affections?" In this case, yes, although the English countryside locations help a lot.
BRITISH FILMAKER ANDREA ARNOLD won an Oscar for her short, "Wasp," and the Cannes Jury award for each of her features, "Red Road" and this year's "Fish Tank." Young actress Katie Jarvis caused a stir with her debut performance in "Fish Tank" as an angry, unfocused teenager drawn to her mother's new boyfriend, who's ... it's hard to say. Kind? Creepy? Attentive? Too attentive? Michael Fassbinder of "Hunger" plays the mysterious Connor in this transfixing study of burgeoning sexuality and adult responsibility.
» Landmark E Street Cinema, 555 11th St. NW; opens Fri. Feb. 5; 202-452-7672. (Metro Center)
Get Your Shorts On
Attention span too gnat-like to sit through the whole D.C. Shorts Film Festival? See what you missed — or at least the best of it — when "Best of the Fest" comes to the Burke Theater at the United States Navy Memorial. The films on Friday and Saturday's slate include the juried award winners and audience award winners from 2009's festival, and indicate that there's a metric ton of filmmaking talent far from Hollywood. You'll see a tense courtroom drama, an acrobatic circus mouse, a pharmaceutical grifter and even a particularly pernicious fridgefull of leftovers.
» U.S. Navy Memorial, 710 Pennsylvania Ave. NW; Fri. Feb. 5 & Sat. Feb. 6, 7-10 p.m. $15 per show; 202-362-1444. (Archives-Navy Memorial)
Photo courtesy IFC Films
LAUREN CONRAD MAY have left "The Hills" when she departed the MTV reality show in May, but that doesn't mean glittery, glitzy Los Angeles is totally behind her. In fact, it isn't — that world is splashed all over the pages of her latest novel, "Sweet Little Lies," which hit bookstores Tuesday. In June, Conrad stumped all her haters with her best-seller, "L.A. Candy," which introduced readers to a group of pretty young women who became reality stars thanks to a show on the infamous network PopTV. So, you know — her rise to fame, but on paper. "Sweet Little Lies" is the follow-up to "L.A. Candy," yet another thinly veiled account of Conrad's life, as her main character, Jane Roberts, deals with the hardship of being young, rich and famous. Conrad is stumping for her book like any mortal, but its 309 pages basically tell us everything there is to know about her life, no interview required.
» EXPRESS: What's the most blatant example of you injecting yourself into the novel?
» LAUREN CONRAD BOOK EXCERPT: "Sweet, natural and vulnerable, [Jane] was a person everyone could relate to. She was pretty, but not too pretty. She liked to go out, but she didn't like to get wasted or do drugs. She worked hard. She was loyal to her friends. She came from a close-knit family."
» EXPRESS: Does anyone else from "The Hills" make an appearance as a fictional character in this new novel? Say, just to pull a name out of the air, Heidi Montag-Pratt?
» LAUREN CONRAD BOOK EXCERPT: "Madison was the perfect cliché, with her dyed-to-the-max platinum hair and penchant for shopping, partying, and guys. But she was constantly bugging Trevor for more airtime; so far, he'd managed to keep her at bay with carefully worded compliments on the theme of 'quality over quantity.'"
» EXPRESS: What will people learn most about your rise to fame from reading the book?
» LAUREN CONRAD BOOK EXCERPT: "Jane remembered then that the cameras were still rolling. ... This was what Trevor had told her to do when they spoke on the phone last night, wasn't it? ... Trevor's suggestions ... were simply meant to help shape the girls' conversations while they were on-camera. To make things more interesting for TV. After all, they couldn't just sit there and talk about nothing, right? Right?"
» Borders, 11054 Lee Highway, Fairfax; 22030; Sun. Feb. 7, 2 p.m.; free; 703-359-8420.
Written by Express contributor Roxana Hadadi
Photo courtesy Andrew Macpherson
Addison Road