Kevin Marshall's America » News / Current Events

Everything I’ve Written for Spike.com (so far)

kevinmarshall — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:32:37 +0000

-or- THIS IS WHY YOU DON’T SEE SHIT HERE NO MORE

You’ll notice that this blog has been…well, sparse as of late. Mostly I just use it to remind people that I’ll be performing stand-up comedy, such as TOMORROW NIGHT!

Boo-yah! Gotcha. You can’t escape that shit. I’m too quick. I’m like a self-promoting comedy cat, springing out at you when you least expect it. You are a mouse in my jaws. Come out tomorrow night or I’ll tear you apart.

Anyway, here’s everything I’ve been working on, since people keep asking me to send them the links of the stuff I’ve been writing as if I somehow don’t have all this fucking work to do and because they can’t use Google, or poke around Spike.com for five minutes. I’m not bitter, honest. I’m just really hot in this office and cranky and on the man rag.

Also, if you’re on Tumblr, take a peak at KEVIN MARSHALL vs. THE INTERNET, which is for all intents and purposes my main blog now.

Also, do you follow the All Access Weekly and Spike TV Tumblr blogs? If you do, THAT’S ME, SUCKAS! Surprise again!

So here’s the articles. Please note that this doesn’t include stuff like me covering the releases of the iPad Mini, Call of Duty, Halo 4, etcetera and so on that are more time-specific/spec listings.

Articles for Eddie Murphy: One Night Only (premiering tomorrow night at 10/9c on Spike):

The Many Faces of Eddie Murphy – a profile of Murphy’s wildly varied career, from SNL character actor to outrageous stand-up to family friendly film lead to Oscar contender.
Let Your Soul Glo: Our 5 Favorite Moments from “Coming to America”
Eddie Murphy’s Great 8 Film Performances

For All Access Weekly:

My Editorials for MMA Uncensored Live:

Cage Wars 14, the area’s 2nd MMA event, is TONIGHT at the Crowne Plaza in Albany

kevinmarshall — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:41:22 +0000

Below is the official press release from Five Guys Fighting.

I’ll be covering the event for the Knick Ledger and might try to write a feature piece to shop around. Time constraints may prevent me from following through on that threat.

——————-

5 Guys Fighting Presents the Areas Second Full Contact Mixed Martial Arts Event

Contact: Shannon Miller5 Guys FightingCagewarsny.com

5guysfighting@gmail.com

Press Release

5 Guys Fighting and Cage Wars Ny Present Their Second Full Contact Mixed Martial Arts Event

Weigh ins open to the public and media tonight 10/25 at 6:30pm at Legion training facility located at 1208 route 146 Clifton Park Ny.

5 Guys fighting is proud to announce Cage Wars 14 the Capital Districts second amateur Mixed Martial Arts event. Amateur athletes from around the northeast are scheduled to compete on Friday October 26th at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Albany. This will be the areas second fully sanctioned full contact fighting contest. All the fight night action will follow similar rules and procedures as popular professional leagues such as the UFC, PRIDE, and IFL. This event will be a followup of the highly successful and groundbreaking event held on August 11th of this year in which 5 guys fighting became the first promoter to hold a amateur MMA event in Albany.

Cage Wars 14 will feature contestants skilled in boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, ju-jitsu, and a number of other martial forms. Contests will be held in a octagon and feature 3, 3 minute rounds. Our current fight card will include 3 Cage Wars championships. Sponsors for this event include Legion Training Center, Extreme Striker, New York Boxing and Atlas Jiu Jitsu.

Formed by Professional Boxer Shannon Miller and partners, 5 Guys Fighting has consistently worked to advance the cause of Mixed Martial Arts in the state of New York. 5 Guys Fighting has currently held 13 competitive martial arts events in venues around the Capital District and Western New York. We have conducted in excess of 140 individual fights and represent over 300 fighters from a number of gyms and schools. As the areas premiere competitive martial arts promoter we offer an opportunity for fighters to compete locally for fans, friends and family at the highest levels with the largest crowds.

Doors open for the show at 7pm with fights starting at 8pm.

Please E-mail requests for additional information on rules, sanctioning, press conference, and access to the fighters to 5guysfighting@gmail.com

Are Romney’s Chinese Investments Damning or Distracting?

kevinmarshall — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 14:33:41 +0000

motherjones:

Mitt Romney’s Stake in Chinese Stocks

The GOP candidate invested in 10 Chinese companies recently—including ones that embezzled, partnered with Iran, and stole US trade secrets. The lowdown is here.

Well, in fairness, there’s not many American banks and big corporations that Romney could invest in that aren’t crooks and liars and cheats.

That said, from an observational standpoint: I’m surprised that the Obama campaign hasn’t been hitting him harder on this. And not just the investments in particular, but also the potential outsourcing of jobs. Really they should be hammering this point home since all his speeches and his statements in the debates were all “jobs jobs jobs.”

On a more personal level, I’m getting more and more disturbed by the tone both campaigns are taking against Chinese corporations. Not just because it seems hypocritical given the abuses over the course of the last two decades that led to the global economic collapse (emphasis intentional). I also mean because it’s an obvious, and in my opinion hollow, attempt to recreate a Red Boogeyman for the sake of scoring easy points on foreign policy on voters who can’t be bothered to understand the intricacies of it.

Now, I’m not of any false pretense here when it comes to the Chinese government and its abuses, both in terms of economics and human rights, as well as how that extends to their expansion of the private sector (people often talk about corporate corruption and power as a sliding two-dimensional scale from free market to socialist but it’s far more complicated than that and arguably that scale doesn’t really matter; but that’s another discussion entirely). What I am saying is that there are worse companies and threats here and abroad, and though criticism may be warranted, the emphasis comes across as hypocritical and duplicitous.

“You…don’t know what words mean, do you?”

kevinmarshall — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 17:59:06 +0000

From the Romney Campaign’s blog: 7 Incredible Personal Stories About Mitt Romney You May Not Know

Well, it IS incredible. Incredible how a rich kid took ecstasy at a rave, crashed at someone’s house and was found through a tip line:

In 1998 the 14-year-old daughter of one of Romney’s partners at Bain Capital, Robin Gay, had disappeared after attending a rave party in New York City. The distraught father was beside himself with terror of what may have happened to his little girl…

A break came, after media publicity of the search, when a teenage boy called a tip line asking if there was a reward. He hung up, but not before the police traced the call to a home in New Jersey. The girl was found in the basement of the house undergoing withdrawals from a hit of ecstasy.

Romney, through his efforts, had saved the girl’s life.

Emphasis mine.

You have to read the rest of them. Story number two tells the tale of how Romney, after making an awkward joke that might have offended some people, had to apologize by buying a VA hospital milk. The sixth story tells a time when Romney and his sons saw a family drowning near their lake home and didn’t just watch them die.

This isn’t a knock on Romney, but the dolt who wrote this. See, there are other stories that genuinely are acts of charity, such as his paying for the college tuition of two quadraplegic students. If it had just been those it may have helped humanized the guy. But they’re muddied by nonsense and stories of just doing what any halfway decent human being would have done.

Flack and fatwas

kevinmarshall — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:13:56 +0000

I’ve seriously gotten more flack on Tumblr over calling out Cloud Atlas’s yellowface than I have any other view I’ve expressed in recent memory.

Which at first I found weird because just seeing the stills alone, I was shocked and couldn’t see how anyone could see it as anything but racist.

But then I thought, wait a minute, why do The Wachowskis have such fervent defenders of their art to the extent that they’d actually defend something so obviously racist and wrong-headed as what was done in Cloud Atlas? I mean, it’s The Wachowskis. They haven’t done a good movie since the first Matrix fifteen years ago.

I don’t just mean that casually. Every movie they’ve done since has been just awful. And yet the way these kids are writing into my inbox you’d think they were defending Rushdie from the fatwa. But like, guys, they’re so in the wrong here and “Speed Racer” was no Midnight’s Children, you know? And I’m willing to bet “Cloud Atlas” is going to be objectively shitty too no matter how magnificent it looks (par for the course with the Wachowskis).

Speaking of Rushdie, his memoir Joseph Anton, covering the events leading up to the controversy over The Satanic Verses and his years spent in hiding, is out now. He decided to write it in the third-person which I find intriguing if not strangely off-putting. I’m curious if it makes a statement about how detached he felt from events at the time or if it was just an attempt to give the false perspective of an objective bystander.

Reviews are slowly trickling in. Some are saying it’s typical Rushdie: beautiful, elegant, poetic, inslight. Others are saying it’s typical Rushdie: self-indulgent, lacking in self-awareness, meandering, and 650 bloviating pages.

I’m going to pick it up. It’ll take me forever to get around to reading it, but at least I’ll know it’s on my bookshelf.

Who are the 47% really, and who are the 47% Romney is referring to?

kevinmarshall — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 15:20:22 +0000

Who, exactly, are these 47% Romney is referring to? There are two answers: the statistical 47% that lead to that oft-repeated soundbite, and the 47% Romney is actually referring to.

Ta-Nehisi Coates shared this quote from Lee Atwater describing “the Southern Strategy” on his blog today. The quote was first published anonymously, then later attributed to Atwater in the 1980s. Three decades later, it still proves revelatory.

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”

This sort of cynical race-baiting is common to the party and the repercussions are still felt today, and will be for a long time.

The latest Romney controversy is a testament to that long, ugly history. It is a confirmation of what many suspected, which is that Romney is running for the elite. He has an exclusionary mindset that so many on the right prescribe to Obama, which by the way is almost as quixotic as hack conservative gadfly Dinesh D’Souza’s analysis of the President. He, and not the fictional Obama that birthers claim wasn’t even born in these United States, is the one who grew up in and continues to inhabit a world that is so alien from our own.

If he comes across as an awkward weirdo, it’s because as far as we’re concerned, he is. He can’t and won’t possess any empathy for the common working man, despite his claims to the contrary. He has absolutely no understanding of what struggle is. He doesn’t know what it’s like to operate without a familial safety net. His is a life of privilege, from beginning to end. That alone does not disqualify one from being connected to people in any meaningful way, but combined with his narrow and stilted world view, it’s resulted in what we saw in the video leaked by Mother Jones: a man who thinks nearly half the country is a drain and not worth his time and who, by the way, wants to run the most powerful country in the world.

The “47%,” by the way, comes from the percentage of the country that is alleged by pundits and talk radio douchebags to not pay any income taxes. Which on its surface is true, but duplicitous in its presentation. Those repeating the figure either don’t know or fail to disclose who the 47% really are. the fact that income tax is what’s taken out when you file your taxes between January and April. This is not to be confused with payroll taxes that come out of every single one of our paychecks. So if you’ve ever received a tax refund, you are or were at one time part of that 47%.

Turns out I was misinformed, but the real explanation sent to me was even better:

Payroll taxes are things paid BY THE EMPLOYER every time they file a payroll, so their contributions to your social security, unemployment insurance, etc.

The withholdings that are taken out of our your paycheck every two weeks ARE income taxes . . . they are based on the amount of income that THE EMPLOYEE earns. Those withholdings are no different than what you pay when you file your taxes April 15. If you get a refund, it means you paid too much income tax in your withholdings, but it’s YOUR money that you are getting back (less the interest you would have earned if you didn’t put it in the Feds’ pockets). So you can pay a LOT of income tax every years without ever paying any of it with your filing . . . people who are self-employed (or partners in businesses that they own) are required to make quarterly income tax payments.

The 47% is actually based on the number who people who really do end up making no net payment over the course of a twelve-month period . . . they may have withholdings and then get a refund, or they may not have withholdings because they don’t earn paychecks. Many of them don’t pay because they don’t earn enough . . . but many MORE of them don’t pay because they earn A LOT, but are savvy enough to use various loopholes to get their taxable income down below the level where payment is not required. Romney himself is (or has been) likely one of the 47% for years.

But that’s not Romney’s 47%. Going back to Atwater, the 47% is a code word used by Romney and the other thirty out-of-touch, smarmy millionaires in that room for a very specific group.

Blacks.

Already there are those on the defensive reading this that, I’m sure, would insist that Romney was making a statement on socio-economic class. But any attempt to separate the racial implications and present it simply as class betrays, if not sincerity, a fundamental misunderstanding of race and racism in this country. Because even those poor white trash that we’re going to put in the 47% are n*****s in the eyes of these men. People like Romney may be able to create a rainbow coalition in their smug world view out of this parasitic 47%, but there is absolutely no mistaking what color the faces of the people are when he invokes the term “Middle Class” with such reverence and concern.

People are calling this a disaster for Romney. Yet a part of me, cynical as it may be, can’t help but not be surprised at all by this. It’s the sentiment his most vociferous supporters have been propounding over the last several months, and it’s the narrative they’ll continue with up to, including, and past this coming November’s election. Will it hurt Romney now that we’ve heard it coming straight out of his mouth? Perhaps, but were any of us that were affected by this statement actually considering voting for this awkward, privileged goof? Is there anyone, honestly, outraged by these comments that up until now thought this useless fucking haircut would be a good Commander-in-Chief? That he’d invite anything but ridicule and disaster upon us when put in a position to make decisions that affect the entire planet?

Bush, at least, came across (and still does) like he’s able to talk to a human being without playing a prank on him.

Joke’s on us.

A Super PAC has a new ad for Romney/Ryan where a nervous closet case assures his wife he’s conservative

kevinmarshall — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:35:11 +0000

Hey so is this guy trying to convey that he’s so gay if you stood next to him your shirt would catch on fire but is desperate to hide it from his wife with weak “uh, yeah, those gays sure are bad” deflections, or is he just a really really shitty actor?

YOU MAKE THE CALL

(and don’t vote for Romney and Ryan)

Florida Buffoonery

kevinmarshall — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:58:08 +0000

So this new law they have where they require drug testing for welfare? Turns out that it costs the state more money than it saves and hasn’t curbed applicants.

Anyone with a modicum of sense could have looked at this proposal and told you that.

Note: I actually had this post sitting in drafts, but with the RNC going on figured now would be a good time to share it. Particularly with that We Built It nonsense. I’m wondering if we can feign outrage at other claims that were never made? “Hey, Obama! You didn’t create that rainbow, it was the reflection of water droplets! #ScienceDidIt”

That botched painting of Jesus Christ is art in its purest form.

kevinmarshall — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 01:07:01 +0000

HAHAHA! Oh my God, you must watch this video of the woman who took it upon herself to restore a classic painting of Christ and transformed it into an internet meme.

I know I’m late to the game with my analysis of this, but…I kinda think it’s art now.

Before, it was yet another dull, lifeless representation of Jesus that was technically sound but whose lack of expression and passion betrayed the stakes of what the artist was trying to portray. It’s Jesus with a crown of thorns, presumably at or near the time of his death, during or shortly after vicious torture at the hands of his tormentors. Yet his expression portrays none of this, and instead looks like he’s trying to decide if it’s worth it to buy the entire tin of Cat Cookies for Peoples from Trader Joe’s if he’s not even going to be in town next week.

Now, after the botched restoration, it has new life. It has become an allegory for so many things that are deeply prevalent in our culture. The first being the propensity of ignorant amateurs to take it upon themselves to execute tasks that require mastery and skill far beyond their reach; a reckless arrogance that has brought us everything from ruined Renaissance paintings to Ted Talks.

The second, more obvious allegory is to religion itself. It is a thing, after all, that gets represented, embraced, and executed in very strange ways. You have to admit that even the original piece was yet another example of the strange fascination with and fetishization of suffering that has been so rampant in religious art throughout the centuries. Then, in a panic, it is transformed into this ghastly thing by an anxious parishioner who could not stand the thought of it changing and, subsequently, transformed it into something unrecognizable to suit her own ends.

It is art, folks. It is more art than most anyone else who ever tries at it can ever hope.

They should never fix it. It means more now than it ever did before.

…did NBC News just write that Neil Armstrong was “a common killer”?

kevinmarshall — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 18:11:57 +0000

10th paragraph: http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/26/13489038-neil-armstrong-an-uncommon-man-with-a-commonly-deadly-disease?lite

The screen capture just in case someone finally fixes it (, for fuck’s sake):

He was far from normal, though common as A KILLER.

And when news first broke of Armstrong’s death, they had “Neil Young” in the headline instead.

So, uh, is there any level of NBC that doesn’t screw things up spectacularly?

Edit: yes, obviously, we all know what the author meant to say was that coronary disease is a common killer. That’s the point, was that it was such an egregious oversight that still got through and still hasn’t been fixed.