Sunday, March 02, 2008

Breast Bread


A curious memento from today's New York Times:

On a flight from Paris to New York a year ago, [Michel Gondry] was served a piece of bread. And while it was most certainly the end of a baguette, he could see only one thing: the breast of his former girlfriend [...]

“I noticed that it had an unusual shape, and I started to eat it,” he said of the piece of bread. “And then it reminded me of her.”

So he took it home safe, and has kept it ever since, on a shelf.

“It’s a piece of bread,” he said. “I’m not going to cry over it. But there’s some sadness. It was a breakup that was never really explained. There wasn’t an argument.”

He does not really fetishize it, he said. But he can’t throw it out, either. Besides being an absurd yet tragic memento of his doomed flight on Air Love, it is also the most pure realization of Mr. Gondry’s double-duty approach to reality.