★★★★★ Where the forecast had promised drenching rain and howling wind, daybreak instead brought a pale blue sky, with gray and white shreds of cloud blowing away. All that remained of the bad news was wet ground, quickly drying, and a few trees stripped bare, and an ugly green line offshore on the radar app. The sky cleared out entirely; the construction crew, not as far down below the window as before, steered the hose from a pumping boom as it spewed a floor’s worth of wet concrete. The power trowel cast a sharp shadow as a lone worker, trailing the rest of the crew, steered it across the smoothing and lightening slab. The breeze was lively. Downtown, heading down Lafayette, it was possible to walk face-first into dazzling light and warmth, the passing details floating indistinctly. On Prince, though, there was no bright side of the street left. The sun, inexorably descending the analemma, had now lost the churchyard wall. It was necessary to go looking for the light — up to the roof, following a timer set for 30-minute intervals, to ensure the brief afternoon would not escape. A small bee or wasp buzzed around the trembling red depths of the brightest of the Japanese maples in the planters, drawn to either the promise of sap or the illusion of an unscheduled blossoming.

Sometimes you just want perfectly competent straight-ahead rock, and when you do these guys are just as good as any other option. You don’t always need to think about things, you know. [Via]

How large was dinosaur doody?

This is actually a few days old but I am just now finally able to post it because — oh God, no, I am getting a little sick again. Go on without me.

If you’re not all that busy this afternoon why not listen to a bunch of versions of Al Green’s “Take Me To The River”?

by Rahawa Haile

The Best Man Holiday is a success. That is not particularly a “surprise.” It did not “over-perform,” nor did it soar for a “race-themed film,” as USA Today originally wrote. To speak of it in these terms reduces The Best Man Holiday to thousands of frames of low expectations. It existed and won. As a film, it was 50% an above-average comedy and 50% an abysmal drama. But financially — the only metric that matters to studios — it was a knockout. Set in the present. Not filmed by Tyler Perry. Of which you can expect to see more.

Malcolm D. Lee’s movies, in fact, have nearly all been significant earners, from Undercover Brother to Scary Movie 5. Only one — Soul Men, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac — did not perform well. It was also Lee’s most expensive movie, and was released three months after Bernie Mac died.

The Best Man Holiday, the director’s seventh film, cost $17 million and has already earned just north of $30 million on its first weekend. It premiered to an audience that was 87% African American and 75% female.

On its surface, The Best Man Holiday is successful black men in expensive suits saying I love you and praying to God. Taye Diggs plays Harper, a best-selling author and NYU professor who has fallen on hard times. (In the first film, set in 1999, he’s just about to become a famous writer, thanks to Oprah.) His friends are now accomplished football stars, marketers, headmasters, and powerful TV executives. There are cameos by a Token White Boyfriend who spends his winters skiing in Vermont. The film’s characters are summoned at the start to spend a week celebrating Christmas as a family. When the cast convenes at Morris Chestnut’s mansion for the holidays, everyone laughs and talks about blowjobs. The screen becomes littered with gorgeous topless men. Later, a sex montage is tenderly scored by Nat King Cole’s loin-numbing “The Christmas Song”; you can’t win them all.

Unfortunately, the majority of the film’s comedy lies in its first half. People eat, drink, and are caught interacting one-on-one in easily misread moment after easily misread moment. The film is happy until it is sad. Very, very sad. Everyone cries. The characters cry. The audience cries. I cried watching Monica Calhoun lose herself in a rendition of “O Holy Night,” with which my theater audience of hundreds sang along on opening day. There are plot twists and complications and adversity, throughout which the thrust of the remains firm: family can cure all.

Or at least certain family members can. The women of The Best Man Holiday fare much worse than their male counterparts. There’s the exceptional chef, whose skills have no apparent bearing on the financial health of her existence. Another is a housewife who literally cannot rest until two primary male characters settle their differences. Yet another woman is a former stripper whose history, blown up on YouTube, costs her husband a $2-million endorsement for the school they run. There is a sex-crazed “Real Housewife of Westchester” who is chastised for her voraciousness by the film’s Lothario, Terrence Howard.

Nia Long plays the sole powerful woman, whose boyfriend at one point states he loves the whole “strong, independent, Olivia Pope thing,” but feels as though sometimes she doesn’t need him. “I don’t,” she says. It is phenomenal, until her tough exterior is branded a weakness by the others. (Eventually, she realizes… that she loves him!)

Taye Diggs’s character, the titular best man, is consistently unbearable. He is reduced to an anxious, desperate schemer. His best scenes involve interacting with his shrewd literary agent. Unsurprisingly, the agent is exasperated by Diggs’s lack of social media presence and his new, complicated manuscript. “People want 140 characters — not 140 characters.”

The film’s superhero arrives in the form of our host Morris Chestnut, as the gridiron star Lance, for whom God, family, and football reign supreme. There is virtually nothing the beautiful family man can’t do. In some ways, it is an accomplishment for Lee that Lance’s invincibility becomes insufferable only within the last 20 minutes of the film, where Chestnut miraculously delivers a baby. A breech baby. In an SUV. With his bare hands. In a snowstorm. In traffic. On the day of a funeral. In space. Fighting dinosaurs. Making waffles. For God.

It’s another episode of Whose Black Film Is It Anyway? In this case, the movie belongs to an audience that has traditionally turned out in droves to see Christian-themed, family-oriented depictions of black life. And yet there is no denying the relative media-based isolation of ventures such as The Best Man Holiday, specifically with regard to music and television. In 1999, The Best Man soundtrack had The Roots, Maxwell, Lauryn Hill, Eric Benet, Meshell Ndegeocello, Ginuwine, and Tyrese. This year’s soundtrack features R. Kelly doing “Christmas I’ll Be Steppin’” and Mary J. Blige with the equally unmemorable “This Christmas.” Within the film, the musical high point occurs while watching the male cast members lip-sync New Edition’s “Can You Stand The Rain,” released 25 years ago. No surprise that 63% of audience members this weekend were also over 35.

The Best Man stemmed from a sitcom era that yielded “Living Single” and “A Different World,” sketch-comedy as diverse and influential as “In Living Color” (hi, current iteration of “SNL”!). It preceded the year of Love & Basketball. It followed the year of Rush Hour, He Got Game, Beloved, Bulworth, Dr. Doolittle, Enemy of the State, and yes, Woo and I Got the Hookup.

It is worthwhile comparing the differences in era. I Got the Hookup — made for about six dollars, produced and written by and starring Master P, was released in 655 theaters. This year’s The Inevitable Defeat of Mister and Pete — directed by George Tillman Jr., who produced the Barbershop franchise hits of 2002 to 2005 — played in 147. The best black film I saw this year, Gimme the Loot (which won the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s SXSW) was released in 10 theaters. The highly acclaimed Mother of George? In eight. When the black films with the widest release are ones about slavery, servitude, and the slaughter of black men, it is not a renaissance we are experiencing — it is resignation.

This all-or-nothing approach is accompanied by another classic variety of commercial consolidation. Kevin Hart, comedian and reality star, appeared in no fewer than three of the trailers before the showing of The Best Man Holiday.

When critically acclaimed black independent films are squeezed deep into the margins, wide release black comedy-dramas are forced to serve as the middle ground between them and the biopics and period pieces. It’s a lot of pressure, and the compromise appears to be stark binary choices in film fare. That’s how we get The Best Man Holiday. What new black comedy-dramas may need isn’t the next Spike Lee or Tyler Perry, but the next Yvette Lee Bowser or Debbie Allen, people perhaps somewhat more willing to create an authentic dialogue with their art from start to finish instead of a sermon at their audience or its pocketbooks.

Rahawa Haile is a Brooklyn-based writer. You can find her on Twitter.

“Men may have larger noses than women because they generally have more muscle, demanding larger noses to breathe in more oxygen, researchers say.”

“11 Sexting Acronyms From the 1930s” is the headline we deserve here in 2013, I guess. Hopefully we’ll all die soon. [Via]

Queens Of The Stone Age, “The Vampyre Of Time And Memory”

I love me some Queens. There is apparently also an interactive version of this video but you know what? I’m happy to limit my interaction to “watching.” If I wanted to do something I’d go outside. Thanks for offering though! [Via]

You’re Fat And Tired Because You’re Tired

“A new study expands on the finding that sleep duration is linked to weight gain as researchers discovered the consistency of bedtime and wake time can also influence body fat. Brigham Young University exercise science professor Bruce Bailey studied more than 300 women from two major western U.S. universities over the course of several weeks and found that those with the best sleeping habits had healthier weights.”