How To Go Places (or: The Return of Summer Fridays Radio)
Also: Strawberry granita, jet lag, James Salter, mafia territory, Paul Simon, Italian cops, Soho House, Stignano, and the long-awaited return of FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays Radio.
Table of Contents:
The Return of Summer Fridays Radio
How to Go Places, Pt. 1 (or: Strawberry Granita at the End of the World)
The Best Shower You Will Ever Have, Over and Over Again
A Brief Encounter With Some Italian Police, Deep In Criminal Territory, Before Another Plate Of Status Pasta (or: How to Go Places, Pt. 2)
1. The Return of Summer Fridays Radio, the Greatest Seasonal Radio Station Ever.
Don’t call it a comeback — or actually, you know what? Do. Summer Fridays Radio is, after much public clamoring, officially back for the season. But don’t call it a podcast, because it’s not. What it is: Music, mostly, to be played loud, out of cars, Bluetooth beach speakers, in headphones on subways, trains, or — why not? — on beaches, as well.
The first episode can be found right here on Soundcloud, or right here:
Meanwhile, are you going to be in Cannes next week, by any chance? The Official Summer Fridays Radio Season Opener celebration will be, as well. Thursday night, location TBD. Wanna join? Get in touch.
Now, to today’s text program, wherein you’ll find dispatches from around the world of Fridays in the Summer. Herein, the strawberry granita, shower, and a borderline criminal plate of pasta that may change your life, and certainly changed ours.
2. How to Go Places, Pt. 1 (or: Strawberry Granita at the End of the World)
Cala Gonone, Sardinia
40.2837767, 9.6389675
5:23 p.m. (G.M.T. +2)
“You go to places” James Salter once wrote, “because you have heard of them.” Which: sure, of course. But also, back when Salter wrote that, the situation wasn’t what it is now — hearing about places you’d travel to was an entirely different thing. You had to actually find ways to hear about them, rather than them finding you — it was a world away from the heat-seeking, FOMO-infecting deluge of targeted media about travel as it exists today. Which is why, inasmuch as I can, I try my goddamnest to let curiosity take me places, influenced by nothing but compelled by something.
For example: The only time I was there, I ended up in Lafayette, Louisiana because of (and only because of) that one zydeco song on Graceland, where Paul Simon’s singing about standin’ on a corner, wondering what a city boy could do. Turns out: not a whole lot. But it was early 2021, I’d just gotten my shots, and I needed a door to darken for the night between Birmingham and Austin on a solo road trip across America to visit a sick friend. And I sure as shit didn’t want to see the obvious answer — New Orleans, a place I loved — in any kind of disrepair. So I went to Lafayette. And I did it for no better reason than: Paul Simon sang about it.
In situ, it was fine. Not a ton happened. Looking back? I unwittingly stayed in the guest house of a folk artist named Francis X. Pavy, who’s collected by Lorne Michaels. His art was everywhere, and was beautiful. I had an incredible cup of coffee in a shop downtown that’d been aged in a bourbon barrel, the kind of weird shit they’d only do to coffee down there. I’ve still got the mug I bought there in my cabinet and the tiny zine I grabbed at the door sitting somewhere in a box of other weird miscellany and receipts I never did anything with.
And then there was that breakfast — christ, that breakfast. On the one nippy March bayou morning I woke up there, as it was absolutely pissing rain, a breakfast I’ll never forget: Johnson’s Boucaniere. The sound of rain pounding corrugated metal roofing, the centuries-old perfume of boudin smoke staying on my clothing in the car until I could put the top down again, somewhere outside of Houston. And yes: Before I left, I went and stood on a corner downtown, just to see what it felt like. I also laughed at myself: You’re an idiot.
But I went because I’d heard of it. Nobody told me to go. Nobody told me it was great. Nobody told me the places I can’t miss while I’m there. And now, nobody can relate to the place Lafayette has in my heart. Don’t get me wrong. Relatability’s a wonderful thing. Shit, it’s definitely less of a double-edged sword than all the things you know make you distinct. But one’s a sword. The other’s a butter knife.
I ended up awestruck floating in a skiff off the Baunei Coast of Sardinia because I saw a still photo, figured out where it was, and said: That. I want to go there. I firmly believe I ended up in Ibiza because of my senior year job twenty years prior in high school racking CDs at a Borders, staring into the Cafe del Mar compilation covers, stoned and fantasizing about what that place was like. I took the early morning tour at the Vatican not because I needed to go to the Vatican, but because of that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams screams at Matt Damon that he might’ve read a ton of books, but he doesn’t know what the Sistine Chapel smells like. Spoiler: Frankincense, myrrh, dust, and a little bit of floor cleaner.
They won’t all be great, shit, they won’t all be good, even. But when you plan travel following a feeling above all, the kind that drives you towards a thing and maybe is the place itself, at the very least, you’re gonna have that. Something ineffable. Something inviolable. Something that comes at a real premium these days, which is: Something that’s yours, and only yours.
When we got wobbled off the skiff at the end of the day on the Banuei Coast, sun-kissed and maybe a little seasick, we had another two hours’ drive back up a mountain and down into Cagliari. There was a dockside restaurant, and we needed to take a beat on a land-stable shitty plastic chair before we got on the road. The place didn’t look like much, and had we ordered anything more than we did, probably wouldn’t have been as memorable. But I saw strawberry granita on the menu, and — not really a strawberry granita guy — ordered it. I think we actually ended up getting two. It was on the right side of too sweet, colder than it had any right to be, and among the best things I’ve ever tasted. I’ll happily never order it again.
Strawberry Granita at Hotel Ristorante Il Nuovo Gabbiano, €4.30, available seasonally.
3. The Best Shower You Will Ever Have, Over and Over Again
A different James once pointed out to me to me that humans definitely are not-the-fuck-evolved to do it, not even remotely. We’ve been around for 300,000 years. Most of that time, our ability to move around the planet has kept relative pace with the sun, and what we now know as time zones: horses, then boats, then trains, then cars. Until the last 80 years, when it didn’t, and you could suddenly get in a tin can, and wake up seven, ten, thirteen time zones away. That’s fucking insane.
Compounding this fact: I can’t sleep on flights. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve tried. Reading, eye-masks, zonk-out drugs, forking over too many miles for a business class ticket — none of it works. So what ends up happening is this: I’ll get, maybe, a groggy hour or two of dozing. I’ll arrive wherever I get to. And I’ll tough it out for the rest of the day, in a slightly, sometimes even pleasantly delusional state of fatigue, like having the rare cigarette these days, with a deliberate and mature understanding that this process is probably knocking a day or two off the end of my life. My first time in London, Paris, and Barcelona, that’s how it went. I remember those first days in cities like they’re dreams I’ve somehow managed to hold onto, in fragments and flashes — orange juice at the Boqueria, a full English at a random Soho caff, nearly stumbling into a carousel on my way to get coffee in Pigalle.
Sure, I could catch a morning flight to Europe, dish out for a hotel the night I get in, wake up the next day semi-refreshed — maybe, if the jet lag doesn’t keep me awake regardless — and get after it that way. But then I’d be depriving myself of something I now actively look forward to on trips:
That first shower. God, it is perfect. Washing off the grime, real or imagined, of the uncanny, winged machine flying you across an ocean. Sometimes you’re deprived it, painfully, showing up at a hotel with your bags only to be told your room isn’t ready yet. I’ve tried to anticipate this outcome with a slightly masochistic bent, a little delayed pleasure. It’s only started to work lately.
And the best of those showers? It’s a deluge of water, always. Not a spray, not even anything that has to do with water pressure so much as just a flood of it, powered by gravity from high on up, from a flat showerhead, positioned horizontally — a rain shower. The higher, the better, and cranked to near-scalding temperatures.
And an in-house body wash and shampoo you’d actually want to use. Actually, no — not just an in-house body wash, but several of ‘em, a motherfucking menagerie of soap: “Invigorating,” “exfoliating,” “energizing,” “relaxing,” whatever — enough to make you feel like a kid in front of that first soda fountain, where you’re loading up on all of them, like a psycho, knowing that they’ll all blend into each other but it doesn’t even matter because you get the choice, and you will choose all of it. And finally, on exit: Towels, neither too plush nor textured, and a bathroom amenities setup so stacked you don’t even need to grab your dopp kit.
I’ve only stayed at a single-digit number of hotels like this, but there’s only one hotel group that appears on that list, several times, that can reliably deliver this kind of eye-lolling purifying, cleansing ecstasy — and truly, there’s a part of me that’s loathe to admit this — but it’s the Soho House hotels. The products in the bathroom are from the Cowshed Spa, and what they lack for in anything else they make up for in sheer quantity. If these hotels seem at all to you overpriced or absurd, go, get in one of those showers after a red-eye in which you haven’t slept, and you tell me what that’s worth. I, for one, genuinely can’t.
Rooms at Soho House Barcelona, Shoreditch House, Kettner’s Townhouse, and Redchurch Townhouse from €386/night.
4. A Brief Encounter With Italian Police, Deep In Criminal Territory, Before Another Plate Of Status Pasta (or: How to Go Places, Pt. 2)
Calabria, Italy
38.3279, 16.4289
7:23 p.m. (GMT +2)
A special Summer Fridays correspondent writes in:
I’VE BEEN TO EUROPE every summer for the last four years, after we ceded the Hamptons to COVID full-timers choking the septic systems and making once-sleepy Ditch Plains feel more like Jones Beach Field 6. They can have it. I’ve found summering in the Old World far more enjoyable than anything Far Long Island has on offer.
That’s how — in an effort to seek out my family’s roots beyond Long Island — I rented a car, and drove down the Ionian coast of Calabria, to a small commune on the top of a jagged mountain overlooking the sea.
Stignano is tiny in every way. The streets can’t handle car traffic at the center of town; they were designed for animals, not automobiles. The houses look tiny by New York standards. Even the doorways look purpose-built for people a full head shorter than me.
I wandered around for about an hour, and found what I came for: Signs of ancestry. My mother’s maiden name, Saraco, is moderately common in Calabria. But Tony Saraco from Stignano? That’s a particular line of the family that belongs to us.
I learned about them, the Saracos of Stignano, from two Calabrian cops. They caught me vegging out in my car AC after my hike into town. Probably should’ve have known better to not be a lone man, sitting in deep mafia territory for 30 minutes — which modern-day Calabria very much is — seemingly doing nothing. It’s not like they get hordes of tourists moving through there. Outsiders still stick out. Hard.
The cops asked what I was doing there, and I explained as best I could that my grandfather, Anthony Saraco, was from this town. They looked at each other, and their eyes got wide. ‘Turns out there are two well known Tony Saracos still in the area.
The first is a deeply respected young priest, who regularly receives threats from the mafia for his work against corruption: Father Tonino Saraco. The other is Don Antonio Saraco, a recently apprehended convict, sentenced to ten years in an Italian prison for racketeering and other assorted mafia-related crimes.
My own last name is Del Giudice, which means “of justice.” I assume the cops figured I had more in common with the priest than the mafia boss — which, I suppose, is the kind of emasculating assessment of character I can easily live with — and sent me on my way after briefly teaching me how to pronounce my own name (Del Joo-Dee-Che, not Joo-Diss).
I drove back down the hill to the marina, ordered the local specialty pasta, Spaghetti alla Courte d’assise, a spicy Calabrian dish I’ve only ever seen in that exact part of the world, named by a judge of the court of the same name who declared the pasta “spicier than his own court.”
While I ate, I realized I wasn’t sure if the cops were on team Father Saraco or team Don Saraco. It was possible they were stuck somewhere in the middle, too — God-fearing men, who did what they needed to do to keep the peace in a region not always controlled by giudici.
I thought about asking around town for more information, but mi Italiano, still merda. Having a nuanced conversation with a local about good and evil will have to wait for another trip, when a future version of me speaks better Italian than I do now.
But I’ll certainly be back to Stignano one day. It might not be Ibiza, Sardinia, or Hydra, but it’s easily the closest thing I have in Europe to Robert Moses Field 4 — the finest beach on Long Island that most people cruise right past on your way to points east. The local pasta, pretty good, too. — James Del
Spaghetti alla Courte d’assise at Controra Chiringuito, €15.30, available most of the time.
[Previously, in Status Pasta: The World’s “Rarest” Pasta, Reviewed.]
That’ll do it here. Thank you, as ever, for taking the time — to listen, to read, to hang. Seriously: It means the world. To that end, please, I’ve taken up enough of your time: Get out there, enjoy your weekend, listen to Summer Fridays Radio as loud as you can without causing permanent hearing damage, avoid foreign police, get the unlikely granita, get the window seat, and don’t forget to reapply every couple of hours. I’ve always gotta be reminded, you know?
There have been five Summer Fridays. 11 to go until Labor Day.
As ever,
-f.
Radio is back! Summer can officially begin