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By Root 901 0

and are subsisting thanks to the generosity of others, namely via invitations to parties with plenty of free food and drink such as this. Soon after reaching the party, Freddy, tall and lean with a bicycle cap whose turned-up bill says “Just Do It” (an homage, ironic statement, or just a hat?), procured a full bottle of champagne and was happy to share, happy to be alive. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” he told me while managing to simultaneously pour, dance, and signal to his partner to scam another bottle. To thousands of young agency and production company creative people such as Freddy, who didn’t shell out thousands on a delegate pass to the festival, Cannes is spring break for people who like to kern type, Mardi Gras for those who dissect YouTube hits as if they were Bergman films. What was I thinking, wanting to go back to my room?

Around 2:00 a.m., waiting for the tram back to my hotel that will never come, I struck up a conversation with a creative team from Saatchi & Saatchi New York, who told me they had a TV spot shortlisted in the film category. I asked them if they agreed with what the creative director from Dallas had contended earlier, about the anti-American bias. The art director, a woman in black leather pants, told me that it would be ironic if this was the case because, although they worked at a U.S. shop, she is from Austria and her partner is from the Netherlands.

At 3:00 a.m., walking back toward my hotel with Dante, determined not to stop again at the Gutter Bar, I passed four men drinking and dancing on the roof of a van sponsored by the Shoot Argentina Film Commission. A few steps beyond the van I recognized a Russian ad exec whose seminar on the history of Russian advertising I’d left earlier in the day when he began to read the body copy of a second nineteenth-century print ad about smallpox prevention. A young woman from Australia staggered in the other direction with a Gold Lion in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

Of course we stopped at the Gutter Bar, which was again overflowing into the street with thousands of people. Bottles broke on the pavement. Some groups were sitting on blow-up mattresses and couches. Music blared from myriad car speakers. During the entire week in Cannes, I never saw a police officer. There must have been some kind of agreement: unless there’s a murder, or a serious copyright infringement, the rich ad people have diplomatic immunity.

Still later, I wandered across the street to the Hotel Martinez, where a half-dozen Japanese ad people were jumping fully clothed into the outdoor pool. Almost anywhere else, at any time of day, this sort of behavior would stop conversations. But at 4:00 a.m. in Cannes it wasn’t enough to make anyone in the crowd pay more than passing attention. If it happened on YouTube, scored to music and sponsored by, say, a sports drink, we’d probably all watch.

But live, it just felt fake.

I was contemplating a canary yellow car smaller than a golf cart parked on Rue d’Antibes outside the Gutter Bar when Dante somehow reappeared. On top of the car’s tiny roof were more than twenty-five speakers, the quality of which didn’t impress the English-speaking homeless man whom I’d seen at various times during the previous four days. I tried to explain to the homeless man that the quality of the speakers was beside the point, that the car was the promotional gimmick of a jingle house, and the fact that several thousand advertising zealots were staring at it was pretty cool. But he remained unimpressed. As Dante led me away, a matching yellow speaker car pulled up to the curb.

We were very close to my hotel again when a large drunken blond woman stumbled alongside us and asked where we were going. “To bed,” I said, for the third time that evening.

“You cannot go to bed,” she said. “You must first witness the Norwegian experience.”

“Can’t do that,” I said. “I’m a married man. Almost twenty-five years.”

“Me too,” said Dante.

“It is not like that. Follow me.”

Ten minutes later, sometime after 5:00 a.m., we were ordering beer and