In 1973, during the Chilean coup, the folk artist Victor Jara was taken prisoner, and along with thousands of others, brought to the Chilean stadium where the military tortured and killed a large number of people. The guards shattered the bones in Victor’s hands with blunt instruments, then asked him to play them some songs. One year later, in 1974, the Top of the Pops refused to allow Robert Wyatt to perform his cover of the Monkees hit “I’m A Believer,” while seated in his wheelchair. The producer felt the wheelchair was “not suitable for family viewing.” These two events happened within the span of a single year.

The term “crash blossoms” was discussed in last week’s On Language column, by Ben Zimmer. The term, coined by writer Dan Bloom, refers to headlines whose meaning changes when the words therein are read as nouns or verbs, or vice versa. This is a function of headlines brevity, and lack of prepositions. “Ambiguous words often lead to ludicrous and puzzling headline statements,” Grant Milnor Hyde wrote in his 1915 manual, “Newspaper Editing.” Read the article for funny examples. This notion of miscommunication in headlines is humorous and behind the curve.

Two girls recognized me coming out of the gym, in the adjacent parking garage. One I knew, the other was her roommate, and as I went to introduce myself with an outstretched hand, the girl who knows me screeched, “Don’t touch him, he’s been on the elliptical machine for hours!” A day or two later, I was walking to my car behind a gaggle of middle school girls, each hauling a pile of bricks in their backpacks. They would stop at each parked car and write a silly message in the dust on the window, and giggle. “Hi ” for example. They did this to three cars, taking turns with the message, and then came to mine. I sneaked around the back of the gaggle, out into the street, like I was going to cross, and as they started to write on my window I popped up beaming and boomed, “Hello ladies!” They screamed and fled.

The reason I say crash blossoms are behind the curve is because headlines have existed for hundreds of years. The quote from 1915 proves that crash blossoms have as well. What interests me are the crash blossoms that happen in everyday life in our current abbreviated culture. A text message, blog post, Facebook status update, tweet, or spoken word with alternate meanings. Faced with the web, human beings are becoming ever more analytical. The eyeballs constant tether to technology trades ponderance for expedition.

Artist Andy Goldsworthy studies how rivers and tides interact with his naturally sourced creations to gain a sense of time and place. A similar process occurs when the impermanent sea of information washes over a man made point, or a chain of thought navigates the heady currents of commentary. What is lost and what remains, sure, but moreover what happens to us in the happening. A transmutation from mere passenger to navigator, maybe even captain, on the intercoursing waves of ephemera.

“What I now see, I have never seen
What I feel and what I have felt
Will make the moment spring again.”

Victor Jara could not play his guitar with broken hands. He composed this poem (smuggled out of the stadium in the sole of a friend’s shoe) and defiantly sang the song, “Venceremos” (We Will Win), before the guards tortured, beat and electrocuted him, and then shot him in the head. Two months ago, December 3, 2009, thirty six years after his death, there was finally a proper funeral for Victor Jaras. Thousands of Chileans, including his widow, the President of Chile, artists, fans, and militants, gathered for an enormous procession. They carried his body and sang his songs.

Robert Wyatt won the right to appear on Top of the Pops playing “I’m A Believer”, in his wheelchair. Decades later, he recorded the song, “Lips Service,” as a kind of reply to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: “‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’ worried me, I thought, Oh you smug git - yes you fucking did! If you’re talking about ‘we’ I can talk about ‘you’. I don’t often listen to words, but he was saying, Listen to me, I’ve got something serious to say, and I thought - you’d better have!”

My hands are in rough shape. Not dishwasher-era bad, when the endless water, soap, chemicals, hot plates, and metal edges tenderized my phalanges into chuck eye. I’m talking middle class hand scrabble on winter skin. Blisters, three of them, from the elliptical machine. Scratches and toothmarks from playing with Roly Poly. A jagged red wound down my middle finger caused by boiling hot tea water. Almost ten year old scars from my fist fight with a chandelier. To reach in the dark.

…finally fell off. The toenail from my left big toe turned black after I shakily descended Mt. Washington in crampons. Apparently there had been some friction. For more than a month its been black. I did my best not to talk or blog about it; didn’t want people grossed out. I did tell my Uncle Johnny. This is the man who talked me out of fear of public urination (”walk into the bathroom like you own the place, pee directly into the center of the urinal / toilet, make as much noise as possible”) and is a life coach to me. He suggested I keep quiet about the black toenail. Uncle Johnny said that if I went to the emergency room they would pry it off prematurely, and that would hurt like hell. I have been waiting and waiting. Last night, while typing an email to my friend Austin, I rubbed my feet together and it fell off. Roly Poly’s interest was piqued by the dead thing. With my big nude toe bleeding on the floor, I launched into a half hour long photo shoot with the black toenail, feeling a little like Ed Gein. I am almost ashamed to say I have yet to throw it out.

While I have been eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom, my computer has been organizing all the people from my photos into a 9,733 (and counting) face mosaic.

This past Friday was the fullest moon of 2010. Ancient alchemists believed the moon was a plant, and the sun a great animal. In Christian iconography, the moon represents the Virgin Mary. When I urinated on that statue I helped to water the great plant.

I wish my dreams were more filled with the shapes of objects that I run and drive past and barely notice. The river’s water flowing past frozen ice. Branches of trees exposed and brittle. Street lights and the electric bus lines. Black inky shadows in dropping sunlight, the wolf moon howling over my apartment building. Perhaps all this is already there but the details are lost to faulty memory. What I remember of my dreams are the people and places from my past. My mom’s house, her drunken snoring in the next room. Chef Lord yelling at me behind the restaurant, the realization that if I didn’t squeeze out some tears I would get punched. The sea of tranquility my dreams are not. Its like Tupac said…

“I never get to lay back
‘Cause I always got to worry ’bout the pay backs
some punk that I roughed up way back
comin’ back after all these years
rat-tat-tat-tat-tat that’s the way it is”

In my film I will be the alchemist who combines the beauty of the unnoticed with the real human stuff that leaves a mark.

Korean director Ki-duk Kim’s films embody the notion that emotional uplift is a minor virtue compared to the raw human experience. That’s also how I see things through the lens of my own years long battle with “feeling good.” In his 2006 film, Time, the character See-hee has her face reconstructed so that her lover Ji-woo does not cheat out of boredom. The plastic surgery takes 6 months to heal, in which time the two haunt each other as strangers at places they visited often as a couple; the coffee shop, the sculpture garden. After this period See-hee reintroduces herself to Ji-woo, and he does not recognize her as the same person. When he does finally learn her true identity, Ji-woo feels betrayed to the point that he takes drastic action. In the end, nothing is revealed in a crowd of faces. Its all in the void.

An article in the Guardian warned that Ki-duk Kim’s 2000 film, The Isle, had caused audiences to exit theaters vomiting. Naturally I wanted to see it. Its the story of Hyun-shik, a visitor to the floating brothel operated by a mute woman, Hee-jin. The attraction between these two leads to the drowning of a prostitute and the sinking of her motor scooter. A fish is filleted, the flesh eaten as sushi, and is then returned to the water where it swims off. Hyun-shik swallows fish hooks to escape the authorities and Hee-jin reels him in, saving his life. Hee-jin inserts hooks into her vagina and tries to drown herself. The filleted fish is caught again, and released again. The dead prostitute is discovered by divers, and these two become outlaws. Its True Romance, South Korean style.

My friend John, who the Herald called a lascivious playboy, and I went to a basketball game at Boston College. Its a big Catholic school. Despite the hooker hassles, John is real crafty, and he directed me down many a back road to the Conte Forum. I parked for free in a muddy lot across the street from the B.C. campus and had to relieve myself immediately. I walked to some trees and stones and did my thing, and as I backed away, realized I had urinated on a statue of the Virgin Mary.

The actors brought the wineglasses to their lips and drank. They tilted their heads to listen to empty words whispered. It all went slow motion. Suspicion dripped like the wax of Madame Tussauds’ models faces held to a flame, melting into anger, accusations and violence. A mob of silent masked theatre-goers in the gymnasium-as-pine-forest watched the banquet scene on the stage. My vantage point was a window by the spotlight, a floor above, and when it lit up Macbeth like a bolt of white lightning the watchers all turned and followed his gaze up to me. The sea of eyes and mouth-less white masks sent chills down my spine, and I inhaled sharply. In a dream, that’s when I would have woken up.

In Sleep No More, the theater is a school in Brookline Village transformed into another world. The actors speak the language of human bodies and conversations are physical, not verbal. They roam the four floors of the school and attract followings of the masked patrons. I spent most of the time exploring rooms, and found a live eel swimming in a bathtub, a taxidermy dog in a maze of hanging sheets. I stumbled accidentally into scenes like the basement orgy. A female piercing scream is drowned by the throb of techno, the lights go out, a strobe light switches on. An actor disrobes, disappears and reappears wearing a bull’s head, pours red wine down his torso, tears his partner’s dress to shreds. There is sex, a bloody fetus, end scene. The crowd of white masks disperses.

Two hours later the orgy scene plays out again, and what seemed chaotic, random, is revealed to be choreographed with the exactness of a ballet. Yes, I watched the orgy twice, anonymous behind my mask. The magic of immersion theater is getting touched, literally touched, by the story. And you can reach out and touch the real stuff of it. What does it feel like? It feels like anything can happen, and that we’re all in it together. A lucid dream with strangers.

Jennifer, Jwoww: “Oh my God, the gorillas are comin’ out. I see a bunch of like, gorilla juiceheads. Tall, completely jacked, steroids, like multiple growth hormones, that’s like, the type that I’m attracted to. Oh, its juicehead central right now. I’m in heaven.”

Mike, The Situation: “Juiceheads. Big is out and lean is in. It is.”

Jwoww: “I’ve physically seen like twelve gorgeous men pass me. I gotta wake Snickers up to find these guys.”

The Situation: “Thin, thin is in baby. Thin is in.”

Jwoww: “Yo, its gorilla central out there. Get the fuck up.”

Nicole, Snookie: “What do you mean?”

Jwoww: “Juiceheads everywhere. There are so many juiceheads out there, I’m like a kid in a candy shop.”

Snookie: “A juicehead is a hot, Italian tan guy, typically muscly, and loves working out, looking buff, and brawling.”

Jwoww: “Not him, I wasn’t looking at him. I saw gorillas an hour ago. Gorillas.”

Snookie: “Where are the juiceheads? I don’t see any fucking gorilla juiceheads. You woke me up for nothing. Where’s the juiceheads?”

Jwoww: “Not one. You know, I don’t see them anymore.”

Catherine Breillat’s first film, the 1976 French drama “A Real Young Girl,” reminded me of John Water’s 1972 cult comedy, “Pink Flamingos.” Chickens and sex are a common theme between the two pieces. In Pink Flamingos, a live chicken is crushed between the characters Cookie and Crackers while they make love (the director and crew ate the bird afterwards). In A Real Young Girl, the title character Alice and her mother slit the throat of a chicken and drain the creature of its blood, before plucking all its feathers. The mother reaches into its arse and pulls out the organs, which are then thrown to the other chickens in the yard. “Stupid, aren’t they?” the mother asks, while the chickens tear at the intestines. “Chickens are the one animal I feel no pity for.”

Catherine Breillat has not abandoned the chicken metaphor after all these years. In her 2008 novel “Pornocracy,” Breillat describes a woman’s mons pubis like a “plucked chicken.”

The top image shows another of Breillat’s metaphors that has been carried forward many decades. At this point in the film, Alice has taken off her panties and placed them on a half-buried dog skeleton up the beach, and she runs to the water’s edge. Alice pulls up her skirt and opens her legs to the surging sea foam. There is a similar scene in Breillat’s 2001 film “Fat Girl,” that I previously screen-captured. The acts of intimacy between each girl and the sea are demonstrative of each film’s larger themes. In “A Real Young Girl,” a film about sexual awakening, Alice chooses to spread her legs. In “Fat Girl,” a film about rape, Anaïs lies passively on her back and lets the waves take her. Breillat seems to be saying that sex is salty, and tastes like chicken.

I awoke on the first day of my 27th year to the clock radio playing smooth jazz. Someone breathed heavily into a saxophone, there was the tinkling of ivory. The heat was in the 90s, the water pipe directly above my bed practically radiant in the 7AM hour and I lay on my back wearing nothing but boxer briefs, no blankets. The long haired cat stretched out belly up, mouth agape, a strikingly similar posture, one foot over. I had been dreaming about a highway that I driven down once in West Hartford. An elevated highway, marked with green signs, a shortcut through the western suburbs. I had driven down it only once and then lost it forever, now it had returned more than a decade later as a shimmering mirage in the basement desert. When I got out of the car a dog bit my hand and would not let go. The horns and piano melted into a woozy slurry. I reached over and hit the snooze button.

It was Monday afternoon and the restaurant was in the process of being put back together after a long, busy weekend. Buckets of ice, bottles for restock, empty crates and boxes littered the bar. The waiters and waitresses rolled silverware into napkins at unset tables. The kitchen madly prepped for service and listened loudly to an iPod belonging to one of the cooks. At the raw bar, a young woman quietly filled out an application for half an hour. As she got up to leave, she handed it over to the bartender Brian, and asked, “Does it ever pick up in here?”

John and his newborn daughter Amelia accompanied Brian, Ace and I to the first brunch at Trina’s Starlight Lounge. Not only was it a fantastic brunch, but i out-ate John across the board, a rare and difficult feat. He had two entrees, the double bacon brunch burger with a fried egg and the biscuits with gravy, as well a short stack of silver dollar pancakes. I had the double bacon brunch burger with a fried egg, a short stack of silver dollar pancakes, a bowl of grits, cornbread, hash browns, and three more fried eggs on the side. And then I eyed his baby Amelia and almost ate her too.

I started going to the gym to crank out 1000 calories a day. While running on the elliptical machine I sometimes imagine a kind of gristle ATM where the exercisers can deposit their daily chunk of calories. I sweat a lot (no seriously, A LOT) as the gym is in a basement where the heat is similar to my home, and people get scared. They get splashed. Its like they’re exercising next to a dolphin. Sometimes they move to a machine far away from me. I make a big show of cleaning up. I work out in a bathing suit and when I’m done its like I just hopped out of a pool.

I have become interested in American folk music from the twenties and thirties. Right now I would say that this music, blues and soul vinyls, NPR podcasts, David Byrne’s book Bicycle Diaries, the films of the Criterion Collection (started out as a laser disc distributor, funny), the television shows Hoarders and Jersey Shore, and Roly Poly are my main influences.