Ave Maria

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to
it's true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old as you must
they won't hate you
they won't criticize you they won't know
they'll be in some glamorous country
they first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be grateful to you
for their first sexual experience
which only cost you a quarter
and didn't upset the peaceful home
they will know where candy bars come from
and gratuitous bags of popcorn
as gratuitous as leaving the movie before it's over
with a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on Earth Bldg
near the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes
so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies
they won't know the difference
and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
and they'll have been truly entertained either way
instead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
hating you
prematurely since you won't have done anything horribly mean yet
except keeping them from the darker joys
it's unforgivable the latter
so don't blame me if you won't take this advice
and the family breaks up
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
seeing
movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young


"Ave Maria," by Frank O'Hara from "The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara"




Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.
— Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979

Perhaps the best way of thinking (or have a visceral understanding) of a work of art is... another work of art.
Or, in the case of this video of 6.59m, how one director, Martin Scorsese, talks about the new cinematic and emotional possibilities of the cinema of other director, Michelangelo Antonioni.

During the time of the images, perhaps we can find our face, not like in a mirror (because, who has a face, the eyes, and the voice of Monica Vitti or Alain Delon?), but in the music and gestures of love (the search and failure of it), and in the vastness of the things that surround us.

Enjoy this video, as a prologue, I hope, to the movie(s).
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d0eFv1vHxo