Faces by Picasso

Because my brother's in town from Las Vegas for a big birthday bash, the news that Steve Wynn, a wealthy, partially blind hotelier from Las Vegas, put his elbow through a Picasso caught my eye.

The punctured Picasso is (was?) "La Reve", a painting Mr. Wynn recently sold to Mr. Stephen Cohen for $155 million. Mr. Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire currently in big trouble with the SEC, had long "coveted" the Picasso, telling The New York Times that when he stood in front of the painting he was "blown away," whatever that means.

Being with my brother always brings up big feelings in me, since he's both everything I'm not and everything I might have been. I'd like to think we're at the point in our relationship where we could be with each other without feeling we had to say something, but I don't know that we're there yet or ever will be. Maybe silence is the best place to be only if it makes you at least a little uncomfortable, maybe that's what Mr. Cohen was trying to say when he said he was "blown away" by Picasso's painting.

When I look at my brother, as I did last night at his birthday dinner at La Ciccia, the fine little Sardinian restaurant on Church St., I see something of my mother and something of my father, but hardly anything of me. I think he's looking at me thinking the same thing. Because we're brothers it's ok one of us is thinking this way even if the other is not.