First - on December 11, a mere two days from now, I'll be at the Berkeley Alternative Press Book Fair! Come - get free sketches - talk to me!!

Cubism's a funny thing. The first properly cubist work was created by Georges Braque, not Picasso, and it was Braque who, for the half decade or so following, was consistently the first to expand the frontiers of the genre's possibilities. His stand alone constructions, his use of papier colle, his abstraction of figures - all ideas that paved the way for Picasso's work.

Plus, his approach is just so much more fundamentally likable - take the subject of the guitar. Both Braque and Picasso painted a LOT of damn guitars. Braque did so because he dearly loved music and wanted to render instruments with such hyper reality, such totally faceted representation, that you could feel the guitar by just looking at it. Picasso, on the other hand, saw that it was curvy and had a hole in it, and used it more often than not as a Woman and her Vagina pun. Granted, this is pretty much true of any object that has a hole in it that you find in a Picasso work - he found that, I guess, endlessly clever of him. It's really kind of sad.

As to cubism's potential as a weapon, well, we'll just see about that, won't we?

- Count Dolby von Luckner