16-19th c. waffle irons, from the collection of Andre Breton
image:calmelscohen.com
"'Monsieur, you are a traitor, a traitor to France, and a philistine!' The last word was spat out in a venomous ball of phlegm. Then, without so much as an 'en garde', I felt the stab of a cigarette holder in my stomach. Never, ever pick a fight with a surrealist." When that advice comes from someone named Fiachra Gibbons, one does well to follow it. Gibbons attended the hi-larious-but-melancholy dissolution-by-auction of Surrealist artist AndrČ Breton. And he shows that Americans still have a lot to learn from cranky old Frenchmen ("Your money for the stinking corpse of a poet that you didn't dare become!") about hating Jacques Chirac.
Then there's this Google-confounding quote from a Danny Leigh interview: "Schumacher: Kubrick, Von Trier and the late Russian visionary Andrei Tarkovsky." Looks like surrealism is alive and well and cruising Colin Farrell.