The police officers I saw on Sunday seemed cheerful, and many were speaking peacefully with occupiers. Maybe that’s because the park was under sophisticated surveillance:

Using Beamer, for TeX presentations, however, is a terrible decision. First, an example slide:

This slide is a total failure when it comes to conveying information effectively. It is simply filled with junk: a dense table of contents on the left, author information at the bottom (when the author is physically present, this is unnecessary), and silly graphics in the upper left corner, not to mention three low-res, unidentified, meaningless images. If you look closely, you see that the author’s name appears three times! Another annoying feature endemic to Beamer presentations is the ability to reveal text each line at a time, with the upcoming information visible only slightly, in grayscale. This ‘feature’ only encourages an audience to read ahead and strain their eyes while doing so. A Beamer defender might insist that these design choices are all optional ones; I concede that not every Beamer slide looks this bad. But judging from the presentations I attended at this year’s APSA convention, many do.

Edward Tufte, in a 2003 pamphlet (unfairly marketed as a book) describes many of the problems endemic to PowerPoint presentations – his criticisms apply even more severely to the visual style of Beamer. While Beamer doesn’t have an auto-content option to generate repetitive, dense, and visually desolate slides (something Tufte despises), it does promote the use of text, and most templates promote text too much. Tufte essentially argues that high density text belongs on a handout – something that audience members can take home, refresh their memory with, and find author contact information with. He argues that projected information should be very simple – the data projector should not be used as anything more than a slide projector. Your graphs and photographs belong on a big screen, but text – of almost any kind – does not.

So far I have argued that projected presentations should only feature images – appropriate text should identify, and it should be used extremely sparingly. Beamer can do that, though. But it can’t do everything: there are no bells and whistles, no zoom-in animations, no swirling, flying text. Of course, Tufte also dislikes animations, sounds, and all the other quirky add-ons that Powerpoint features. His logic is simple: they add no information, they clutter the space of the screen (momentarily). But in my experience, a carefully chosen visual stunt is extremely valuable: perhaps it is an ironic way of focusing attention, a bit of humor in an otherwise routine presentation. We are more sophisticated visual consumers than we were in 2003. The ability of powerpoint to move images – in ways that commercials and news reports do regularly – is valuable. It is something that people don’t expect, and it makes those images, once they have settled down, a focal point.

Finally, Beamer can’t do video. For me, or anyone interested in visual culture, that sin is unforgivable.

Some say that laughter – being able to laugh – signifies our humanity; it makes us relatable. But I cannot agree, for all laughter is vestigial: a guttural, obscene reminder of that which we didn’t symbolize. Here is what Baudelaire had to say:

From now onwards I shall call the grotesque ‘the absolute comic’, an antithesis to the ordinary comic, which I shall call ‘the significative comic’. The latter is a clearer language, and one easier for the man in the street to understand, and above all easier to analyse, its element being visibly double-art and the moral idea. But the absolute comic, which comes much closer to nature, emerges as a unity which calls for the intuition to grasp it. There is but one criterion of the grotesque, and that is laughter—immediate laughter.

Baudelaire offers an apology for the significative laugh – that response at least clings, neurotically, to word-play. But the absolute guffaw is psychosis: free from paternal law and symbolic order.

Consider T.V.’s laugh track. Perhaps that kind of laughter is super-egoic, telling us when and how to manage our little psychotic breaks (before the commercial breaks, of course). The laugh track fixes the significative boundaries of the comic, it teaches us not only when to laugh, but how – duration, timber, challenging fidelity to the joyful audience. Mechanical reproduction tames the laughter. But today’s sitcoms are no longer funny by law – the laugh tracks keep disappearing.

And as the laugh track becomes unfashionable, television enters the grotesque. What do we do when we don’t have to laugh?

Robert Kramer directed several acclaimed fiction/documentary-hybrid films throughout his career, including the well-known Milestones (1975) and Ice (1970). But his much later Route One / USA (1989) is my (new) favorite, a film made after about ten years spent in France. Ray Carney writes that Kramer has always been a “great cinematic historian of American life,” but I think that spending time away from the U.S. may have allowed him a more even-handed perspective on these lives. Indeed, Route One exhibits a Tocquevillian sensitivity to the habits and mores of Americans down the Eastern seaboard, and by depicting religious, conservative Americans for the first time, it accomplishes more than his earlier films. In a sequence at a New England sardine factory, we see a woman cutting fish in half. Off-screen, Kramer asks, “How long have you worked here?” Her answer: “Probably seventeen years.” Kramer cuts the interview there.

There are too many memorable sequences to mention, but highlights include an interview with a Christian dry cleaner who inflates clothing in order to more efficiently remove wrinkles; a woman’s fortieth birthday party; and a man who insists on a particularly aggressive pronunciation of Thoreau (THOROUGH!). Poetics both structure the film and anchor its narrative: the journey begins with Kramer’s companion Doc reading Whitman in the forest. In the sequence that takes place in Boston, there seems to be a wink toward Robert Lowell, as well. Here is the first half of his For the Union Dead:

“Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.”

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now.  Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back.  I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common.  Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.

The poem continues here. I have to believe that this isn’t just a coincidence; each shot above follows directly from the one before it. And though we don’t see yellow steam-shovels on screen, we see the concrete and dirt that they are moving directly. We see the tingling Statehouse, an archaeologist explains what the Boston Common used to look like. This is history written on light.