Kevin Marshall's America » Society & Culture

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:

“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.

Pinkman

kevinmarshall — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:51:18 +0000

(from this week’s “Breaking Bad.” Hold off if you aren’t caught up.)

Life imitates art—er, blog

kevinmarshall — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 22:48:54 +0000

Earlier today I posted this satirical take on the moral quandary some have expressed over whether or not it’s right to knowingly support a business that not only openly opposes something you believe in, but actually works to abolish something you claim to be a fundamental right.

It was all of five minutes before I started receiving texts, emails, and a reply to the post that pointed out that someone has actually offered a solution to this offensively absurd “problem.”

What harm can this do? Well, it certainly brings to mind the sale of indulgences, but it’s not quite that cruel. Instead, it promises to offset your purchase of Chik-Fil-A by noting that your equitable donation to the marriage equality movement will outweigh the contribution you make to hate groups vis a vis your purchase.

Except it’d be better to only make the donation towards marriage equality than to do both. By perpetuating the success of Chik-Fil-A and ensuring their profit margin isn’t harmed, you are contributing to the very thing you claim to despise.

I want to believe that stuff like “Chicken Offsets” is a good thing in that it solicits donations that otherwise might not come in. However, I can’t help but think this comes at a price and continues the inane dialogue over whether or not one can afford to support marriage equality and put your money where your mouth is. Especially considering that all it requires you to do is not bring it to a place that prides itself in having so much animosity towards you and hate towards those you claim to support.

In short: is just not eating that shit really that hard?

I face a dilemma and need your insight

kevinmarshall — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 20:07:05 +0000

The last few weeks, the Twittersphere and Google Circles and Foursquares and Facebook Triangles have been abuzz with controversy over the stance of Chik-Fil-A’s turbo-Christian CEO, Dan Cathy, who told a Baptist magazine that the company was against same-sex marriage and that people were arrogant for telling God that same-sex marriage is okay. After all, only Dan Cathy and a portion of people that identify as Christian are able to tell their God that may or may not exist what it says and thinks about gay marriage.

I’m not here, though, to stoke the flames of religiosity and get people worked up with my views on Atheism and lack of patience with those whose faith lies in a literal belief in any and all text written at a time when people shat into holes in the ground and watched or participated in executions for entertainment.

No, I’m not going to do that, because I need their help to address a very serious moral quandary.

I must begin by stating this unequivocally: I believe gays should have the right to marry. Actually, it’s a bit stronger than that. I think to not allow them the same rights and privileges is a violation of their civil rights. I find quoting the Bible for legal precedence to be antithetical to the legal and intellectual well-being of our nation. You’ll find many that will play softball with the opposition and claim to respect a faith-based opinion on gay marriage. I’m guilty of that myself. Like the President, though, my stance on this issue has evolved. Unlike the President, I will go so far as to say if you believe gays shouldn’t marry and would work to prevent legislation from allowing that to happen, you don’t have an opinion. You have a prejudice. I think there’s a very real difference and with time, thought, and research, I believe it even more strongly.

On the other hand, Chik-Fil-A is a fast food restaurant that makes fried food that I can eat.

Clearly you see and can probably feel the depth of the dilemma that lay before me.

Prior to this, if you had told me that a restaurant or business that I frequented had a CEO that held an actively hostile position towards an issue of such importance, I wouldn’t hesitate to boycott whatever product they put out. If, for example, the CEO of McDonalds said that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was a terrible thing and had Ronald McDonald scream “white power!” at the end of their commercials, I’d never eat their food again and I’d be horrified when people flocked to their locations for a free coke and fires on White Supremacy Soft Drink Appreciation Day. As such, I can’t support Chik-Fil-A knowing that its CEO not only opposes marriage equality but uses company profits to fund organizations that actively lobby against equal protection for gays, including but not limited to The Marriage and Family Legacy Fund, The National Christian Foundation, and the Family Research Council.

On the other hand, chicken sandwich.

It’s not an easy call to make. Anything but. I know and have known many gay men and women who grew up believing they had to exist in shadows and continue to live with casual discrimination in a society that, by and large, overlooks their plight and seems to think that we’ve come further than we have. Some of them I am indebted and under onus to due to their friendship, kindness, and generosity. It would seem only fair to and for them that I oppose any company that tells them they don’t deserve the same rights as me.

Then again, waffle fries.

How on Earth do I cope with this? I don’t want to support Chik-Fil-A, but how can I not eat food that probably lowers my life expectancy with each swallow?

The rights of friends and loved ones versus food that is kind of good tasting but awful for me. My cross is so heavy. Will someone please unburden me?