Monday November 23, 2009

Track #5: The Ad Trade and “The Arab Bank”

That’s me, just minutes after I arrived in Cannes to the cover the International Advertising Festival in 2001. The advertising festival is like the Cannes Film Festival, except it’s about advertising—which is to say that it lacks everything that makes the former sexy and interesting. There’s no paparazzi, few celebrities, but still plenty of Americans. For that week, it feels like the place runs on Eastern Standard Time. Dinner at midnight. Drinks until dawn. Breakfast at noon. It’s fun but exhausting, especially if you have to file stories every night via (what was then) shabby European dial-up.

“The Arab Bank,” Cassingle’s final track, is based on two experiences from Cannes—I covered the festival for three years—and is the product of trying to turn them into one experience. On my first trip, I saw a mother/daughter team of panhandlers in the old quarter of town just like the team described in the story. The child—it might have been a boy—was blonde and theatrically pathetic, and his or her mother pushed a sad calliope. A few years later, I was hassled by a local tough when I returned late to the Hotel Majestic. He seemed to have the town by the balls, this guy. He was ripped from working out and he wore a Gold’s Gym t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His head was shaved and he wore a bandana (I think). He pulled his black Mercedes right up to the door, hopped out, and exchanged something with the concierge. On his way back to the car, he sized me up and snarled, “Where you from? New York?” I had the feeling he would have tried to sell me something if my answer had been different.

From the inside, the story became about imagining that this guy and the calliope kid were the same person—Marco, the story’s protagonist. Along the way, other things happened. There was a story in the New York Post about teams of organized thieves robbing celebrities’ hotel rooms in Cannes. (I wish I still had it. I kept it in a folder for years.) And I got more interested in the celebrity angle. Tourism is the ultimate example of information asymmetry—the engine that makes captialism go—since the local knows everything and the visitor knows nothing. I liked the idea that celebrities—the ultimate insiders in our culture—could be preyed upon like yokels.

The story originally appeared earlier this year as a serial that ran during the Cannes Film Festival. Incorporating Google Maps and Street View, it was my first attempt at online storytelling. I liked how it turned out, and I was pleased to find out that the form made me sharpen the story itself. Pouring it into this mold made it better. And I’d love to know what tourists think when they stumble upon the map of the story on Google Maps.

Download Cassingle: This concludes Cassingle Release Week. Thanks to everyone who has followed along. If you haven’t already, download Cassingle—which includes “The Arab Bank” and four other stories—and my previous e-book, 2006’s Single.