September 11, 2026
See I See #21: Picasso Cyprus: Encounters with the Ceramics of the Mediterranean
Ending the Endless Summer
Here I am at the end of summer 2026 in Tossa de Mar, starting to get ready to return to NYC. An attentive audience will notice that a chunk of my energy online has shifted to my See I See Substack channel. I'll backfill a bit and update the See I See archive from YouTube going forward.
The problem here is my problem with social media *cough* Instagram *cough* and the addictive nature of it, the ligature it has on career movement, the chokingly restrictive format (all artists should be incensed about this, but oddly, not), the indiscriminate nature of the audience connection via algorithmic design (conflicting with career movement promises), the drive towards shorter and shorter attention spans, and the attendant tendency to erase memory via constant scroll overwriting. We all deserve better.
/end rant
Yes, a hot summer was had worldwide. Even while life seaside can ameliorate this a bit, you can't spend all the time in the water like an otter to offset the waves of heat and humidity. But we've all had hot summers in the past and this was another. So yeah, I'm trying to bank the memories for the upcoming winter and hoping at the same time for lots of white fluffy snow. Dry winters are no fun.
Addressing Pop Blau! Pop Blau is Catalan for Blue Octopus. Catalan is lovely (from my perspective as a visiting Yanqui) for its comically curt vocabulary. Octopus = Pop. Good = Bo. Everything = Tot. The image above was snapped and cleaned up in Photoshop from a defunct restaurant around the corner from my house. My wife and I have spent summers here since 2000 (please verify my claim in the archives in the left margin) and when we first arrived, the sea was crawling with pop. It wasn't unusual to witness curious baby pop climbing on the back of swimmers emerging from the sea. Over the years, sadly, the octopus gradually disappeared, but during the recent two years, we have seen their return. Nature is rhythmic after all.