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Today I ventured off
to
explore the city of Cannes armed with
a camera and a fistful of change for the "200" bus. Cannes is
best known as the location for the
annual "Cannes Film Festival" when movie stars, directors, producers
and financiers all come to be seen and are eagerly received by the
press and paparazzi. In May, when all this takes place, the
restaurants are crowded and traffic is a nightmare so the locals
usually plan to be out of town. The rest of
the year, Cannes does what it is really best at best at: catering to
the
wealthy.
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It is impossible to
have
too much money in
Cannes. There are luxury hotels, casinos, high end designer label
clothing shops and jewelry stores all of which have employees trained
to calculate your bank balance as you walk through the door.
Cannes is definitely the place to be if you enjoy teenagers snapping
pictures of themselves in front of your Ferrari as you park at the Ritz
Carlton. If you happen to be a bit more reserved then there are
villas set in the hillsides and yachts in the bay. Even the beach
is partitioned into separate
private enclaves where a spot in the sun away from the less fortunate
can be found for a fee if you happen to be staying at the right
hotel.
To survey who happens to have a surplus of disposable
income, for whatever reason, all you have to do
is check who is staying in Cannes. It started with the British
aristocracy in the late 1800s when one fellow made an unscheduled stop
because of either a storm or a plague further east. In the 1920s,
F. Scott
Fitzgerald wrote (in "Tender is the Night") that the Russian
aristocracy had just fallen out of
favor and that the Americans were being welcomed in Cannes (or maybe
that was the
nearby Cap D'Antibes). A few years ago
most of the Lamborginis had license plates written in
Arabic. This year it is the Italians--their excess cash rumored
to be related to the adoption of the EU, the euro and some sort of
change in the banking system.
The most lasting trend though is
the overall increase in affluence and numbers of the upper-middle-class
from everywhere.
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No matter how wealthy
you
are there is always the comforting
reassurance in Cannes that there are others who can make you feel
comfortably average. The most obvious display of this is in the
rows of luxury boats in the port. Each one dwarfs the one
next to it until the one on the end looks like a toy. The
disorienting part is that they all have the same
basic form. The motor yachts mostly look the same just above the
waterline with the V-hull, chines, and square stern of
a semi-planing hull and some array of electronic navigation equipment
on top. In between there is a little variation but from a
distance a 30 foot yacht looks much like a 300 foot yacht
because everything, including the radar domes, are simply scaled
up. The only clue to scale is that the 30 foot yacht has one deck
and perhaps a small flying bridge above while the 300 foot yacht has
five
clearly discernible stories. If you notice tiny little shadows of
people moving on
board at a distance then it is probably not really very big. Upon
close inspection you
might detect a small launch strapped to the
back of a 50 foot yacht but past about a hundred foot the stern
typically has a built-in
garage to hold all the jet skis and other play equipment. The
really big boys have garages on the sides as well. Only
the cruise ships are bigger but they are for a much less dedicated
class of seagoing people. I wonder if it is permissible to
associate with someone who's boat is more than twice as big or half as
small as your own. It must be very lonely cruising around looking
for another Akhir 100.
I spoke with one fellow who complained that he finally sold his yacht
because it was so much trouble keeping a crew full time, planning ahead
so that it could be in a desired destination at the right time then
flying there for the weekend. "You might as well stay in a hotel
or lease a boat", he claimed. It frustrated him that his crew
seemed to enjoy his yacht much more than he did and that they drank all
his booze. Still, should
you desire to try the lifestyle: A used starter yacht between 50 and
100 feet can be had for about 20k euros per foot. But don't
forget to budget for about 10 to 20% of new price for yearly
maintenance and
always bring a letter of credit from your bank when cruising because it
holds several thousand gallons
of diesel--to drive that 2450hp double V-15 connected to that 30"
surface-piercing prop. Ah, but then sit back as you watch that
rooster tail of sea water shooting high into the air for hundreds of
feet behind as
you move 300 tonnes of luxury across the sea at 30 knots and
know that it was a worthy cause.
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One advantage of being in an area with so much
disposable
income, even if you are a land-lubber,
is that the arts follow. I stopped at a retrospective of an
artist named Armand Avril who has been doing
interpretations of primitive art in a kind of found-object mosaic
relief. It was interesting to see how he had developed a pallet
of
common objects and symbols that were repeated to form first a texture
then larger
images. He kept the workmanship low and the materials
crude. Significantly, the exhibit included
what looked like actual African sculptures that I assume inspired
him. If so, then this is the first time I have seen an artist
offer
such a direct reference to
where his ideas emanated. Some of his own work was sculptural in
the natural-materials-bound-in-fiber style but was dated starting in
the 70s. A second exhibit in Cannes was at the Palm Beach
Casino where all things Salvadore Dali were available:
lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, jewelry, dinner plates...
This was surprising to me because a previous exhibit of Dali's
sculptural work was shown
in St. Paul de Vence just last month.
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