The Most Refreshing Drink of the Summer
In Marseille, the action actually is the juice. Also, đ¨new Summer Fridays Radio!đ¨ Plus: The Litmus Test of the Summer! French women! American boys! Regrettamine birds! And more!
Deep breath.
Okay.
And weâre back!
Table of Contents:
Summer Fridays Radio: La Plage
The One True French Drink Of The Summer
The Great Anti-Lions Lions Party
The Single Greatest Mass-Rejection of A Loser This Summer
What Actually Happened In Cannes (or: Strays On The Croisette)
1. Summer Fridays Radio, Episode 5: La Plage.
I know. Itâs Saturday. But hey, itâs always Friday somewhere. Time for some fun: The return of the only radio show endorsed by the official Substack of Substacks, Sundberg, and plenty of others â Gossamer called it âgenuinely transporting.â Whatever you call it, donât call it a podcast â these are the sounds of the French Riviera: The music, the waters, the people, the sun.
This week, we bring you the brilliant aural textures of the Cote 'dâAzur, along with a 90s party-sleaze classic, a Japanese pop starâs collaboration with one of the best electronic musicians working today, a track from That One Album Everyoneâs Talking About This Week, a cosmic soul classic, and plenty more.
You can find this weekâs episode right here:
Or, if you prefer, on Soundcloud right here. Donât forget to turn it up.
1. The Single Most Refreshing Drink In France
Marseille, FR.
43.2906, 5.3742
5:52 p.m. (GMT +2)
Look, you try running at full speed through French traffic in motherfucking Sabahs, okay? It was chaos, the entire thing, a goddamn fiasco. My shoulder bagâs bouncing up and down on my back and through it the corner of my camera lightly stabs me through its soft canvas, while Iâm also trying to roll up the waistband of my shorts so they donât fall off my ass, and Iâm pulling them up with my left hand, Iâve got my right hand fully-extended, palm forward at oncoming traffic in the stiffarm position, head on a swivel, knowing exactly what Iâm doing, but also wondering what, exactly, Iâm actually doing. Being a New Yorker, I instinctively try to keep my head down and veer far away from urban bedlam, discretion being the better part of valor and all.1
Backing up for a sec: Nothing (and I truly mean nothing) makes a hot day in France hotter than dealing with some bullshit checking into your room. Which I had to. For the record, it was this place. And I was suffering the travel gods punishing me for booking the cool design-y âapartmentâ instead of just springing for the splash-out-on-the-last-night hotel like I was supposed to, and when I finally get in there, having blown enough time, I ventured right out in search of That One Boutique In Marseille Everyone Hits, stopping every three blocks for something cold to drink on the walk: Pellegrino, iced tea, iced coffee, whatever.
At that point, if someone wanted to give me an Iced Arsenic Latte, I probably wouldâve at least tried it. To call it âhotâ that day is to say that getting microwaved alive might be âunpleasant.â So I wasnât drenched in sweat, but well en route.
Iâve convinced myself the reason I sweat like Patrick Ewing â which I have since forever, and even when Iâm in great shape2 â is because Iâm from the desert, and us Desert People werenât made for humidity, though Iâm sure plenty of Desert People actually do fine in humidity, and itâs just me, though I wouldnât know, because most Desert People donât actually make it out of the desert (or at least the one Iâm from).
Maybe I sweat so much because, as someone once told me, my big beautiful heart that bleeds too much is forever swollen and Iâll one day die from its largeness, and as far as things to die from, I could do far worse (see: mosquito-borne illness, tiny Australian death jellyfish sting, televised ISIS beheading, plane crash Iâm fully conscious for, not in that order). Anyway: It wasnât until the walk back from the store â which was just fine, as That One Store almost always is â when I see the hunter green and traffic-light-yellow kiosk, opposite the courthouse in the middle of town, with a giant sign on it: STATION UVALE.
It wasnât until later when I learned this kiosk â full name: Station Uvale du Palais â is the last standing grape juice bar (or: stations uvale) in Marseille. Grape juice bars â not to be confused with wine bars, I swear to god â are actually A Whole Thing in Marseille, or, were. Ironically, they were big back when people drank grape juice as a way to (they believed) heal their livers. Canât make this stuff up. Now, theyâre mostly out of existence. Except for this one. Which has been in this guyâs family since 1943.
And the reason I didnât know they served grape juice was because, as they were closing up, all I saw was a giant blender of a juice that was way too bright to be orange juice â it was tangelo orange, the exact shade of orange that brings me a weird, unnatural micro-surge of delight. After I do my whole je suis desole je ne parle pas Français parlez-vous Anglais bit, the guy shrugs, and does the âEnglish?â bit and Iâm like âyeah, Iâll takeâŚ.whatever that isâ and nod to the juice.
The guyâs explaining that the juice is orange, carrot, and celery â I think â before we hear barking and screaming from across the courtyard between the kiosk and the juice stand, a textbook cacophony. And the juice guy starts screaming at me, going LEETLE WHEET DEWG! DEWG!!!! and a white Shih Tzu comes tearing out of the park like a motherfucking bat out of hell, so I start running after it, through traffic, keeping an eye on it, across the street, up the hill and a sharp right up the block, making sure it doesnât get creamed by a stream of Peugeots I run halting through, and this girl on a CitiBike or whatever theyâre called in France, she tears ahead of me, and we manage to trap it with a pincer maneuver â the dog turns, and starts running towards me, Iâm backing up and stop in front of it like Iâm Rudy Gobert, crouched, arms akimbo, the dog hightails it back towards the girl on the bike, she jumps off it, the dog rockets towards me again.
Another guy rounds the corner onto the street, followed by its owner, screaming its name in French at the top of her lungs â like, ear-piercing, Toni-Collette-In-Hereditary screaming â and no, I donât know the dogâs name, because it was all in French, and here she comes, loud, hand bloodied, makeup running, heels clacking. We all finally corner the dog, and after calming down, it lets the owner (still wailing in French) put a leash on it again, and what becomes clear is a big dog went after it, got it in a death grip, owner got a bit of her hand eaten, dog got a little chewed up but itâll be fine, lady might need stitches but more crucially needs a Xanax.
The gathered crowd is jabbering with each other in French and one of them looks at me and I do my âjesuisdesole (wheeze) jeneparle (wheeze) pas (wheeze) Fr (wheeze) fuckit, sorry, English?â And they genuinely look surprised, one of them gives me some water, some merci beaucoup were exchanged, and when I get back to the juice stand, the guy running it sees me from afar, and I give him a thumbs up, and shrug. I get out my wallet to pay for the juice, and the guy hands it over for free, laughing. American? He asks. Yeah. He shrugs, either surprised that one would spring into action, or not surprised that one of them would be dumb enough to risk life and limb for the Ussain Bolt of French Shih Tzus. The juice was excellent, and not even because of how it came into my possession.
âStill not sure what the lesson is here, because I still wonât endorse getting involved in foreign affairs, less because I donât believe in it but more because I think thrill-seeking and heroism should broadly be matters of discretions writ-large, but especially in othersâ countries, and I donât wanna be responsible for anyone else doing anything dumb. That said, if I got hit by a Peugeot chasing a dog in Marseille, there are way less funny ways to go out. Also, I got a free juice out of it. Beat that with a stick!
Station Uvale du Palais, 27 Cr Pierre Puget, 13006 Marseille, France. âŹ5/juice (gratis with recovery of wayward Shih Tzu).
3. How to Throw The Single Greatest Anti-Cannes Lions Party at Cannes Lions, In a Few Simple Steps
Find the only cool spot in town. Cannes isnât a town with much of a subculture â much like Las Vegas, itâs a town mostly bemused and preoccupied by the transient population moving in and out of it with the large events that take over every few weeks. So, honestly, not hard, in the respect that thereâs only one: Natural wine, cocktails, and Calabrian pizza/snacks spot Club Nautico, located on the Pointe Croisette, about a 15-minute walk (and a world away) from the epicenter of the madness (the Carlton).
Convince them to let you play your own music over a series of drinks. A little cash up-front might also help.
Make it a Thursday night thing. That way, you wonât have to compete with Tiesto at Google Beach Sponsored by Haliburton, or whatever. Moreover, most peopleâs souls will be thoroughly ran-through after three nights of that mess. Promise nothing but relief from it.
Assemble the correct list of people to invite. Adhere to strict standards. No advertisers. No sponsors. No people whose presence can further a meaningful professional relationship or your capital position. No professional scumdicks (Troy Young, Scott Galloway, that entire class of white media/tech cornball who roam Cannes Lions in packs, like the Large Adult Children Of The Corn). Are they decent? Are they normal, innocent men? Then they can come. Otherwise: Non. Despite having strong feelings against most forms of exclusivity, the fact is, most people going to any party at Lions are the reason you are forced to throw a party in the first place. This, really, is about altruism.
Photoshop a box of Gauloises less than 24 hours before the party for the flyer with sparse details and most of the text in merde French (see above). Also, one rule: No photos (actually, sorry, two more, both entirely reasonable). Let it rip. Enjoy the brief hype cycle for your party, far better and more manageable than a longer one.
Get cooking. And so we did. Thank you, to everyone who showed up at the FOSTERTALK Presents: Summer Fridays party. Iâd tell you what happened, who all was there, do all the things youâre supposed to do after a party in order to justify it as a business expense, but thatâd go against the spirit of the thing, no? That said, I will let others speak for it: Chris Danton noted it as having âTHE RIGHT CROWD,â i.e. âa rad wine bar, Foster Kamerâs perfect playlist, cigarettes on the table, and a proper crowd.â Somehow, a million parties in that town, and as everyone there mentioned, we were the only one considerate enough to place a bowl of heaters on the table. (Etiquette, a French word!) True story: The only thing required to throw a good party in a place like that is a group of people solid-across-the-board-enough to actually mingle with one another, and ours did. They also got drunk and ate pizza and blasted vacation darts and got to hear some good music in public for the first time all week.
Hamish McKenzie, randa, all you folks at Substack, next year â or really, pretty much anyone anywhere â if you need help throwing the kind of useful and objectively wonderful soiree privee that people actually have fun and enjoy instead of another lame brand party where everyoneâs looking over everyone else shoulder trying to see which brands, brand managers, or âcreatorsâ need their egos humped, *makes âphoneâ with pinky and thumb, puts to ear* you know who to call.
4. The Single Greatest Mass Rejection of a Loser This Summer (or: An Excellent Cultural Litmus Test)
I apologize in advance for the next 386 words. If youâre not in need of a cool glass of summery schadenfreude, skip right the fuck ahead to the next one, I wonât mind. Otherwise:
While I was in France, so was Clavicular, our Young Narcissus of the Moment who â much like his cultural predecessors Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton â is an example in bad taste and a lack of discernible talent being elevated solely by excellent PR, especially given how much press he got for a moment earlier this year from some of the most renowned media outlets on the planet.
And yet! Somehow, in literally none of that press did anyone interrogate what a singularly American phenomenon he is, which was a real failure of imagination! But it also made the joy that was watching this man repeatedly get dunked on by French women a real treat for many people, myself included, and especially some French men. Oh, mon frere, mon tĂŞte de con, man fuckface. That said, quelle surprise for moi it was non. Speaking here as a guy with, historically, romantic predilections towards accents, fringes, and barely-disguised contempt (for me), that he got the voulez-vous coucher avec poissons, ce soir? treatment by the women of Paris was, letâs just say, the worldâs biggest non-shocker, and the kind of good theater I never thought Iâd get from an otherwise vacuous waste of time and space, in a universe full of it.
That said, heâs provided a helpful litmus test for the kind of human you are, or are not. If you think the French are, as he argued, âimpolite shitbagsâ with âno AC, [a] terrible economy, [and a] horrible quality of living,â3 you probably fall on one side of a binary. The other is Anthony Bourdainâs take:
âIf you canât enjoy Paris â if youâre lucky enough to have a passport, and a few bucks in your pocket, and find yourself in Paris, if you canât find your way to a good time somehow, then there is no joy, no hope, no light in this world. How can you not love Paris? Please, please God: Let me go to Paris someday, and go to the wrong restaurant, and be treated rudely by Parisians. Let me wonder randomly, not knowing where Iâm going, confused, and find myself in some less-than-wonderful cafe, with some less-than-the-best charcuterie, or steak frites, or having a glass of not particularly good red wine. What better thing can you hope for?â
5. Strays From The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity
Yes, I waited two weeks to write about it, because I actually need to digest my experiences before regurgitating them for content, but the top-line here? Iâm terribly displeased to report that itâs going to become an increasingly important mess for many corners of commerce, certain kinds of inescapable culture, media, and more. But the first thought Iâve got for you is the last thing I was told about it, which was someone recently remarking to me that Graydon Carter remarked to them that Cannes Lions is the âJersey Shore of Cannes.â Not right, but not entirely wrong, and a perfectly calibrated sentiment for both speaker and subject, where relevance is concerned. The second is this:
âOurs is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.â The best thing anyoneâs ever written about The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, and it was written nearly a century ago, by D.H. Lawrence, on the first page of a book about â perhaps appropriately â a woman who needs to get laid outside of her boring upper-class marriage with a guy whose dick doesnât work, so she bangs the working-class gardener (who, spoiler alert, doesnât exactly ascend to the upper classes as a result of this). Thereâs definitely a metaphor in there somewhere.
On my first morning I woke up at Cannes â and this is not, at all, a joke or exaggeration â heard âNon, Je Ne Regrette Rienâ playing from speakers on the croisette down below, just outside the window of our room at the Miramar, which is located right next to the Carlton, which is kind of the epicenter of what happens at Cannes Lions. Not sure Iâve ever actually heard it played in public, and thusly assumed either a soundsystem was being tested, or I was indeed being incepted. On the morning I woke up to leave, outside the window, presumably out of the same speaker: the Black Eyed Peas âI Gotta Feeling.â On repeat. Like, four times in a row. Iâm still not entirely convinced Iâm done being incepted, but it really did bring home the urgency in which I needed to get the fuck out of there.
Most write-ups of Cannes Lions seem to want to instill FOMO in those who arenât there: If youâre mad about [the] Cannes Lions [International Festival of Creativity], youâre actually mad you werenât there, that kind of thing. As itâs been explained time and time again, aspiration sells, and thus, FOMO does, too. This oneâs gonna a little different. Consider, if you will, the public service benefit that is spreading HOMO: Happiness of Missing Out. And my friends, am I excited to share all the Cannes Lions BIG HOMO with you that I can.
[And yet: The mysteries of what goes on inside The Grindr Bus will, unfortunately, persist.]
I hit the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for a couple of âreasons,â such as they were: Proximity â I was âin the neighborhood,â coming from Greece â morbid curiosity, and, frankly, a bunch of people I actually very much love and treasure, in tight proximity to one another, in the south of France. And come on: Itâd be hard not to have a good time. And a good time I had â not because I was at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, but because, again: South of France, with a bunch of people I adore. This represents a major break in tradition for me: Iâve never been to SXSW or CES or any of the trade shows across America that typically attracted the media class, half out of protest (theyâre bullshit expenditures, which for as long as Iâve been in media, media hasnât been able to afford) and half out of principle (if Iâm going to travel anywhere, I donât want to run into a bunch of people from work while Iâm there).
That said: Cannes is mostly business-side media people, not other journalists or media people, who from 2010 - 2020 â peak SXSW and CES â all seemingly worked at BuzzFeed or VICE, and were, in roving packs, nightmare humans. (Say what you will about the Substack Era, at least we no longer have to deal with the Kool-Aid-drunk mentality of over-leveraged new media companies who thought theyâd outlast the New York Times, lol.) Cannes is also in the South of France. And to be sure, I can have a good time in most places. And I did.
So before I say all the mean things about Cannes Lions, Iâll confess: I got to hang out on the French Riviera with a bunch of people I quite like, personally and professionally, and meet a few new ones, too. Any place theyâre putting great journalists on stage in front of money to argue for journalism is not without virtue, Mysteries of the Bowels of the Grindr Bus, or no.
Also: Some of my best friends and favorite people were there, which made the entire thing a low-stakes blast for me (see above, re that whole party-throwing business). Day One, an ad agency, threw a great party with Casey Lewis. I got to watch The xx play a set to 1,000 people, perhaps the worst crowd theyâve ever had to play in front of, but (at least for me) even the worst crowd canât fuck up the rapture of great music (though I wonât piss on those people if theyâre on fire down the line). So, again: I enjoyed it.
But â again â I could have a good time with my friends in a gulag. Crashing at their place in the middle of the croisette? Far from that.
Hereâs what Lions actually is:
Actually, wait, first: Should we really give a shit what Matt Belloni â who doth protest a little much â has to say on the matter? In a word: Non. For one thing: The guy wasnât even at Cannes Lions. For another: The festival he notes as The One True Cannes is, of course, for the industry he covers (film). Which is in an unfortunate death spiral, one so obvious that they made a show about said death spiral, in which he played himself chronicling said death spiral. Itâs in chaos, freefall, and (letâs not forget) increasingly under the thumb of one of the most egregious modern American monopolies weâve ever seen.
And itâs most directly under threat from all the things most prominently represented at Cannes Lions: Tech, social platforms, influencer culture, and the broader media-technology ecosystem. Itâs quite a fuss over what could pretty easily be construed as projection, but then again, is Puck necessarily known, writ-large, for its introspection? Right. So what, exactly, is it then?
Cannes Lions is so, so much more absurd than he ever couldâve imagined from afar. By the time I heard about the people seizing up while getting hydration IVs at the Ciroq House, all I could do was âquelle surprise.â Itâs not that Belloni wasnât right, itâs that he wasnât right enough.
Cannes Lions isnât an industry awards ceremony so much as it an open-air whorehouse where everyoneâs throwing some kind of ass â to brands, to agencies, to big tech â and lemme tell you: The money is buying.
It is:
A trade show for thirst.
A bona fide clusterfuck, maybe the most ostentatious display of wealth, expense accounts, and performative marketing spend Iâve ever seen, in one of the most ostentatious places Iâve ever been â and I grew up in Las Vegas.
Coachella, with the ratio of brands and music inverted.
The Nightmare Blunt Rotation of "Brand Activations.â
An orgy of anti-art celebrations (i.e. big tech and the utterly wack, pedestrian, sexless narcissism of creator culture).
A place from which I saw several videos emerge of people losing their minds about meeting Gary Vaynerchuk (a marketer, a fucking marketer).
The only locale in the world where a not insignificant portion of people in town are dumb and crass enough to believe Scott Galloway and Burlington Coat Factory Scott Galloway (Troy Young) are worthy of being revered as sages of wisdom, rather than (as theyâre known in places where brain stems are still attached) the vapid egghead charlatans they are.
Filled with LLM-worshipping human LLMs, the kinds of people who pass themselves off as knowing something about everything, but their only real talent is projecting enough confidence to get people to believe it (so long as it exists somewhere on a scale graded from âshades akin to realityâ to âunmitigated bullshitâ).
And then some.
I walked around that first day, sweating like everyone else, trying to figure out if any business was getting done, or if we were only seeing the transactions. By the end of the week, I came away convinced: Business is absolutely being done at Cannes Lions, because if it isnât, thatâs the biggest waste of drunk, horny, ecstatic, marks in one place Iâve ever seen, certainly at least proportional to the marketing spend theyâve got on hand. (For what itâs worth, I also talked to a bunch of people who said they did, in fact, conduct business there.)
To understand Cannes Lions, you need to understand talent agencies like UTA, CAA, WME, et al on an essential level. For the uninitiated: Think of these guys as the Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan of entertainment, in that their most basic function is to find money on two sides, put themselves between it, connect it, and drink as much of it as they can. Connecting screenwriters to movies or actors to movies or actors to brands or brands to sports leagues or influencers to marketers shilling the champagne brand launched by the athlete client they just got a deal with the podcast network owned by the actor they also represent: They take money off all of it.
These guys were not at Cannes Lions in a significant way before a few years ago. Now, the UTA party, at the famed Hotel Du Cap â during which UTA client and âCrashâ actor Ludacris performed â was the hot ticket of the week. Are you getting a picture of whatâs happening, here, yet?
Imagine a matrix, with one axis running from art (right end) to artlessness (dead center) to anti-art (left end), and money-losing (lower-half) to break-even (dead-center) to money-making (upper-half). What the Cannes Film Festival prizes, typically, is money-losing but artful work. What Lions rewards is, letâs just say, slightly more artless, and far, far more profitable. My soul aligns with the former. But Iâve seen inside the latter.
The two things that are seared into my memory:
Watching an entire tray of triple-stacked plates come crashing down next to me from the shoulder of a waiter, during a lunch at the Carlton, a hotel where the rack rates begin at 2600âŹ, and are posted on a sign right outside the front door, as if to warn anyone who might even think about thinking of infiltrating the place that what they can and will afford for entry is no small amount of class anxiety (which they will snack on inside, like petit fours from your soul). The tray came down on the marble floors and made one of the loudest, most insane noises Iâve ever heard in a public space â it turned every head in the place. The poor waiter, he looked like his soul left his body. The entire thing was cleaned up in five minutes, along with the waiter, who was quickly rendered away, exiled to wherever they dropped off Napoleon, given concrete Cannes ballet flats, etc.
Seeing a drone show in which Toucan Sam railed what appeared to be a massive line of Fruit Loops in the sky. This was not long after a giant finger poked a massive Pillsbury Doughboy in the stomach. My first thought was that they made movie about this, a cautionary tale called Ghostbusters. My traveling companion screamed at the sky, and wondered: All the advertising spend in the world, and this is the best they can come up with? A doughboy in the sky? A couple of countries over, incredible things were being done with drones by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. That is beautiful. The big Regreattamine-Ripping Bird In The Sky was not.
A thing we only heard about on our last day: Theyâve been filming the new season of The White Lotus in the south of France, and at the Carlton, but the production â which may or may not have something to do with the Cannes Film Festival â wasnât actually allowed to film during the Cannes Film Festival. So all the B-Roll they have of the Carlton lobby slammed with people were, of course, shot during Cannes Lions, which had no problem with it. At all.
Spiritually, Iâm aligned with the Film Festival. My soul is with it. Iâm a Gaspar Noe apologist, for fuckâs sake. And yet: The future is Lions. And I know, I know: Fuck the future. But also, Matt Belloni â if anyone â should know the truth of the matter. Hasnât he seen any movies? You donât fuck the future, the future fucks you. Over-under on Belloni himself finding himself there as a matter of work? Three years, maybe two, either way, Iâm taking the under.
Folks, thatâs it. I just had to get this all out. Weâll resume normal Summer Fridays activities next week, including an update on The Greatest Dinner Party Gift This Summer (we have a taste-test to report!), more radio, more best-in-class travel writing, more rhetorical questions, and then some. In the meantime: Thank you, so much, for reading â as always. I so appreciate your time, and attention, and the fact that you pay any mind at all to something written (and recorded!) for no other reason than the thing itself. As the great summer song goes: Never for money, always for love. That, really, is the motherfucking motto.
Stay warm,
-f.
On the Bystander Scale that runs from zero (âKitty Genovese neighborâ) to 10 (âSpider Manâ) Iâm somewhere around a 6.1. Great/insane thing to discuss on vacation: How likely you are to intervene in a (perceived) emergency. Like, guy sprawled out on the street: Do you check to see if theyâre breathing? Do you call an ambulance? Someone gets pushed on the subway tracks: You jumping in to save them? My take: What matters is less your score, be it a 1.2 or a 9.3, but your awareness of where you sit on this scale, so you can either push people out of the way to spring into action, or get the fuck outta the way for other people to help. Finally, if someone says theyâre above an 8.4, theyâre either lying or a megalomaniacal sociopath. Real heroes donât wear capes, and they definitely wonât rate themselves as such, either. Lying ass motherfuckers.
Which, after two-plus weeks in Europe (and especially the last week in France) â seeing as I was compositionally 60% blanc de blancs, 30% persillade, and 10% Gauloise â I was decidedly-the-fuck-not.
Although Iâd be lying if I didnât say I laughed at this Tweet, which I absolutely did. The French can be impolite shitbags who need more AC, itâs true. But thatâs a small price to pay for what theyâve got on offer, culturally. Like the Japanese, I get why theyâre exclusionary. It reminds me of that line from New Yorker writer Lauren Collins, who married a Frenchman, who once told her: Speaking to you in English is like touching you with gloves on. In 12 words, the French can shame you, make you want to learn an otherwise useless language, and feel like they whispered something magical right onto your G-spot. And yes, Lauren Collins learned French.