birthdays, etc.

Apologies if I already told this anecdote, but my 5-year-old nephew asked his mother this year: “How do birthdays make you older?” It’s a good question, and startling enough that it took me a couple of weeks to figure out how I would have answered it if I had been the one fielding the question.

Anyway, birthday here tomorrow, and I’m always glad to be in Alexandria for them.

4 of my 400-some Facebook friends are also May 9’ers, which I guess is more than three times the average one would expect. Coincidence, or affinity?

Spending the afternoon putting together a Picasso slideshow for Monday, and remembering that I really like Picasso. This is a pleasure, assembling these images. We’re going through Clement Greenberg’s fairly critical essay on Picasso, whose topic is Picasso’s decline (in Greenberg’s opinion) after 1927. That was the perfect excuse to do a completely chronological show of Picasso from about age 12 up to near the end. It’s an interesting exercise.