Reason TV: Journalist Sam Slovick on Occupy LA - Scenes From a New Revolution
"People say, 'What do these people want?, 'Where is the list of demands?' You know, it's like an embryonic movement," says journalist and filmmaker Sam Slovick. "You can't throw a crayon into daVinci's baby crib and tell him to paint the Mona Lisa, it's not there yet?"
Slovick is the writer and director of the documentary Occupy LA: Scenes from the New Revolution, a five part series produced by Take Part and Slake. He sat down with Reason.com's managing editor, Tim Cavanaugh, to talk about the documentary, how Occupy LA became the largest occupation, and the difference in media coverage between the Occupy movement and the Tea Party.
Approximately 9:36 min.
Shot by Paul Detrick and Zach Weismuller. Edited by Detrick.
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Besides, you don't paint with crayons. So there's always that.
Was it even a question?
Oh, sorry...Was it even a question.
He's from LA, so I like to imagine his voice going up at the end of the sentence as though it were a question.
Well, at least they can change Leonardo's diapers and wash him until he's cleaner than an Occupier.
Would crayons be dark to light like oil, or light to dark like watercolors?
Light to neon, like a Lisa Frank poster.
Fuck off, art fag.
dark to light like oil, or light to dark
Fucking. Straight. Up. Racist.
Occupy LA became the largest occupation
Winter.
The Big Lebowski: Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?
[the Dude walks out and shuts the door]
The Big Lebowski: The bums will always lose!
Brandt: How was your meeting, Mr. Lebowski?
The Dude: Okay. The old man told me to take any rug in the house.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003518/quotes
and yet which lebowski do we celebrate dude?
the dude abides.
The Dude wasn't asking for gov't to pick up his tab for grad school, you fucking idiot. The Dude just wanted his rug back.
It really tied the room together.
Shut the fuck up, o3... you're out of your element.
They sat down twice? Heavy, man.
I want to be different, Like everybody else I want to be like
I want to be just like all the different people
I have no further interest in being the same
Because I have seen different all around
And now I know that that's what I want
I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable
I want to be a part of the different crowd
and assert my individuality with others
who are different like me
I don't want to be identical to anyone or anything
I don't even want to be identical to myself
I want to look in the mirror and wonder
"Who is that person? I've never seen that person before;
I've never seen anyone like that before"
I want to call into question the very idea that identity can be attached
I want a floating shifting ever changing persona:
invisiblility and obscurity
Detachment from the ego and all of it's pursuits
unity is useless
conformity is competitive and divisive and leads only to stagnation and death
if what I'm saying doesn't make any sense
that's because sense can not be made
it's something that must be sensed
and I, for one, and incensed by by all this complacency
why oppose only when there's a war?
why defend the clinics only when they're attacked?
why are we always reactive?
lets activate something
lets fuck shit up
whatever happened to revolution for the hell of it?
whatever happened to protesting nothing in particular, just
protesting because its Saturday, and there's nothing else to do?
-King Missile "Saturday"
It's no Detachable Penis, that's for sure.
I want to live like common people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....ature=fvsr
I wanna be Anarchy.
"You can't throw a crayon into daVincci's baby crib and tell him to paint the Mona Lisa, it's not there yet?"
I think a better analogy would be a hipster slacker setting up a canvas, pulling out a box of crayons and an iPad, and saying, "I'm gonna paint me a Mona Lisa, bitch!"
Occupiers are not (physically) babies, their movement is not--and never will be--capable of producing anything more constructive than 10 lbs of shit, and they are old enough to know better.
Jeebus, how much dope do you have to smoke to end up looking as baked as Slavic does in that video?
How much dope would you have to smoke to make a video about OWS?
Before, during and after?
I am thinking all of the above.
Be a proper penniless hippie: Don't smoke your own, just wander around a cop a contact high.
White Indian pray to Great Spirit that SugarFree someday learn good English.
White Indian admire man in teepee. White Indian has plus-size wigwam on backorder with Amazon.
White Indian get angry when Jason make fun of him. White Indian going back to wigwam. Deprive reasonites of his wisdom.
If I were an occupy bumparks participant, I would likely starve to death for fear of consuming anything that I or someone else had handled considering the sanitation in these places.
If I were an occupy bumparks participant, I would likely starve to death for fear of consuming anything that I or someone else had handled considering the sanitation in these places.
The word is "abortion"
Kill it before it becomes mobile. They never do that in the horror movies.
Now I see that hunched-over dipwad in the video. He leans forward and his back splits open. Flailing tentacles whip out, grabbing other idiots, dragging them into the maw of collective idiocy. A sawing, tearing scream rings out as a new lifeform of unemployable asshole is born.
They never kill it in larval stage. And we all know what happens then.
The word is "abortion"
And like abortion, the Left loves it, no matter how gross or immoral it might be while the Right can't give consistent and compelling arguments against it.
A fascinating insight!
+1
That's a pretty good summary of the abortion debate today.
Well played.
Actually, I think he meant "bowel" in place of "embryonic".
You know, it's like an embryonic movement," says journalist and filmmaker Sam Slovick.
Heh, hopefully his "journalism" is a little more coherent than his speech.
It's all very well to say that the movement is "embryonic", but I get the impression that they want action taken now, as if their "Mona Lisa" were all done. But I can't do what they want--even if I were willing--if I don't know what that is.
Some slogans for Occupy LA
"Just When You Thought Scabies Was Gone"
"Loud Voices, Confused Minds, and Twinkling Fingers"
"Your Corporate Job is My Harshed Mellow"
Occupy LA: Come for the free meals, stay for the rape!
Awesome 'kool aid' moment at 5:00.
So many useful idiots just waiting to be lead astray.
"As soon as I...found out about Occupy LA - I'm a journalist in Los Angeles, so if I'm not covering that what am I doing, if I'm not covering the second American Revolution..."
This is how the first revolution looked? Man, my history textbook was waaaaay off the mark.
Didn't you know Washington and Hamilton were unemployable hippies with hate studies and puppetry degrees?
For some reason, I sort of buy the Hamilton one...
It seems more like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure than the first revolution.
That's unfair. Bill & Ted actually learned something about history by the end of THEIR adventure.
IIRC those who started the American Revolution did manage to articulate a set of objections and demands. The result is some famous document, I think.
Yeah, but they were stuffy old white guys who spoke in complete sentences and stuff. Man, we can't, like, be like that!
complete sentences like...she's a slut?
Franklin certainly liked him some sluts, though I think they were probably called slatterns or trollops back then.
They were called Frenchwomen.
Strumpets, crumpets, wenches and ?
Complete sentences like, "Thanks for demonstrating - again - what an utter simpleton you are, Urine!"
Rush Limbaugh has nothing to do with anything, o3.
You should've gone for the "Americans kept slaves like everyone else" straw man instead.
Ezra Klein told me that it was like 500 years old and written in Sandskrit.
Dude, that was like, over a 100 years ago.
The result is some famous document, I think.
Problem is, they forgot to post it on Facebook, so nobody ever read it.
Who cares what a bunch of rich slave-owning white guys wrote, like, a hundred years ago?
At 4:59 you get to see what it looks like when Tim Cavanaugh gives up just in time to avoid his own head exploding. Shortly after there is an edit which, I suspect, is hiding a footage of a Reason intern drilling a small hole into Cavanaugh's head to relieve some pressure.
The Trepanny Opera
Sarcasmic isn't the only guy who lost his head gasket then?
"People say, 'What do these people want?, 'Where is the list of demands?' You know, it's like an embryonic movement," says journalist and filmmaker Sam Slovick. "You can't throw a crayon into daVinci's baby crib and tell him to paint the Mona Lisa, it's not there yet?"
Oh BOO FUCKING HOO
That analogy is so disconnected from reality as to be insulting to the person to which its directed; the implication is, "I really think you are stupid enough to swallow this lame exuse"
How about, "it's an *INFANTILE* MOVEMENT*?? It has all the sense of responsibility of a 2yr old who wont keep their diaper on, decides what food is acceptable to digest, seemingly at random, and cries uncontrollably if you're not paying attention to it 100% of the time.
...
Well, embryonic does mean "not yet developed enough to rise even to the level of being infantile". That's probably about right.
(continued)
It's a fucking *protest*: asking why people are protesting, and what they want to achieve is *not some fucking option bonus homework* dickhead - it's the raison d'etre of the whole fucking thing! If you've spent 6 months out in the cold screaming random slogans, you'd think someone would have cobbled together at least the simulacra of a "manifesto" by now? Or identified a single policy-position other than, "WE DONT WANT TO PAY OUR BILLS!!"
Thow baby da'vinci a crayon? of COURSE thats idiotic! "Baby" d'vinci hasn't had any time in life yet to *do* anything! Who knows if he's going to be a philosopher or a ditch digger?
20-somethings who've never had to support themselves, have just left college, demanding a job as a 'right', and believe the taxpayer should pay their college bills...?
That's comparable to a "baby artist in the cradle?"??
Why are they protesting?
Because people who just camp out in nice public parks in the middle of the city for a few weeks generally get rousted by the cops so that productive members of society can enjoy the parks they are forced to finance. Without the "protest" excuse, they couldn't camp out.
Plus, good weed.
(continued)
Not only am I unimpressed by these 20-something 'drooling newborns with magical untapped potential', I want to slap their apologists in the fact for this kind of fawning tolerance of what constitues EPIC FAIL. And some of these people are Boomers who should at least remember the last protests *that mattered*
I was haranged by one OWS protester last fall, and I turned to him and said, "You're not fit to hold Abbie Hoffman's jockstrap"...
He goes, "who's Abbie Hoffman, one of your corporate overlords?..."
not fucking kidding.
Basically, thse fucking kids need to shit or get off the pot =come up with something semicoherent, or fuck off back to mom's basement. You're just embarrassing yourselves and irritating all the people who aren't as horribly fucking stupid as they are.
Winnah.
I was browsing the video w/o sound at work... and started laughing all of a sudden. I had Tim C. lip syncing, "you'll never get me lucky charms!!"
Seriously tim. Green on Green is reserved for Aquaman, Green Lantern, and leprechauns only.
People who can't manage a decent campsite are going to teach us how to run the world?
So did Slovick just admit that the Occupy movement is infantile? I would agree with that assessment.
"You can't throw a crayon into daVinci's baby crib and tell him to paint the Mona Lisa, it's not there yet?"
And five hundred years later people are still scratching their heads over that painting which pretty much puts your pompous analogy right in the shitter.
"You can't throw a crayon into daVinci's baby crib and tell him to paint the Mona Lisa, it's not there yet?"
Pretty grandiose stuff coming from a bunch of uneducated illiterates.
""they had a policy of Inclusion"....
WTF. I don't recall any protests in the history of demonstration where it had a fucking velvet rope and a guest list. Isn't the whole idea of protests is that all you have to do is *show up*?? They're treating that fact as a unique *virtue*.... fucking TWAT!
and all those 'ex cons' and 'mentally ill etc..'?...
"...all of them can trace their various issues back to the very core of the larger issue of the movement..."
Dear fucking god. A) WHAT FUCKING *ISSUE*?? and B) mentally ill people can trace congenital illness back to.... what.... corporations? money in politics? Income disparity?!? FUCK YOU IDIOT FUCK YOU!~!!!!
"The conversation has begun...
AND WHAT ARE THEY SAYING??!? Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! You never say!! They're "engaging" each other...? They're "sharing ideas"? "powerful and explosive"?? WHAT IDEAS?
man the thing just devolves after the NYT "establishment media" comment. The guy keeps rubbing his face like he's got lice or is worried about his next fix. Perhaps both.
Tim's unimpressed-"terrific" at the end was a classy cap. Like, "yeah, good luck with the primordial ooze thing, dipshit. I can't believe I wasted my time with this guy"
What do we want?!
We don't know!
When do we want it?!
Now!
40 years ago I started out with nothing like most young adults. It's nice to know I was a 99%-er = good guy. Ten years later making $30K / yr = 99%-er = good guy. Twenty-five years later making $100K/yr = still a 99%-er = still a good guy. Now I'm making $200K+ = 1%-er-millionaire/billionaire/not-paying-my-fair-share-of-taxes-greedy-ass-wipe. Sorry...I don't want to be hated....should have stopped at $199K.