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Southbound on Veteran - Bonfire of the Vanities
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7627 Reads
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Proof positive that LAvoice has jumped the shark (I'm declaring it early here and now, just to get it out of the way), you are now reading a post about vanity plates.
 I'll attempt to defuse the jaded sneers with some great sample plates, with arch, self-deprecating style, maybe break it up with bullets - after all, it's only a post on an L.A. blog, not an attempt at high culture. But as I go, the dorsal fin will pass beneath my wheels as surely as rust eats a Chevy Vega, and you'll know that even vanity plates this cool can't save a fledgling site from circling the meme drain.
This morning, I saw a plate that distilled the phenomenon and my obsession with it - the plate that crystalized years of loving, hating and being completely powerless to ignore even a single vanity plate or refrain from dreaming up its owner's thumbnail bio - down to a single, deathless visual-syntactical feedback-loop: The plate on the Jaguar VandenPlas I saw southbound on Veteran Ave. said ...
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... "VANITEE."
VANITEE? What??? Is that some self-referential joke? The Ouroboros myth become steel on a stamping press run by California inmates earning 21 cents an hour? A lifestyle manifesto? The driver's stage name? A pet name for the car? Is it so clever it's stupid? Or so dumb that it passes for sheer brilliance?
What about the Aston Martin Vantage eastbound on Olympic, today, labeled "JMS BLND" - Is that James Blond? James Blind? Jim's Bland? Hard to tell through tinted glass who the guy thinks he is, driving that rig around.
And what to make of another Jag with the wholesome, yet frisky "KNEES"?
Those are just the ones I saw today, maybe the 3,924th through 3,926th plates I've consumed, enough to help Daniel Nussbaum start another volume of PL8SPK, his vivid, stuttering short story collection told using only California vanity plates.
For every genius plate I remember - like the black-on-jet-black 5-liter Mustang GT screaming past on the 118 with the threatening invitation "GET IN" - I've forgotten a hundred more complete wastes of sheet metal and paint: - The auxiliary marque: 74TBIRD
- In case I forget my name: JILLYS
- Bad case of the cutes: BIGKITY on yet another Jaguar (what is it about Jag owners?)
- The stupid marketing-driven tattoo: FRDJOB1
- The pet fanatic: (heart)MYDANE (you used to be able to buy little adhesive pictures of screws to slap onto those and run away snickering ...)
- The "gift": 4RNANA
- The nearly pointless: MY94JTA
But the great ones do blaze with gemlike clarity and wit. The California Court of Appeals judge whose upper-end Benz ragtop said, OVERULD. The model long forgotten but legendarily spotted on the 405, the plate perfect: IM2BZ2P.
The one a former editor of mine claims he almost got back in the '90s for his new, scorching red LeBaron convertible with white leather buckets: DR.SIN.
The 60s Chevy Apache pickup with the oxydized aluminum camper box rusting to hell in a Ventura surfer ghetto, still declaring in old-gold-on-blue, GROMMET with the plate frame adding. "Road Kill - Mystery Meat."
Amid the bad vanity plates, below the endless orgy of Darwin fish humping Jesus fish and Calvins pissing on Fords, Chevys and La Migra, thrives a rich, true regional literature, each of its works bearing the same brisk power to snap your head back and make you gasp as a William Carlos Willams poem.
Today, if you are lucky, you'll read something even better than the best ever to drive past my pitted, bugsplattered windshield: A Lexus coupe in Canoga Park a few years ago: "H8MYKDS (Honk if you hate yours too!!)"
Seen any masterpieces lately? Comment below.
Wanna dream up your own before shelling out 64 bucks a year to be stuck with it for life? Try the phenomenal, infectious ACME LIcense Maker made by Jef Poskanzer at the phenomenal, infectious ACME Labs.
Oh, and by the way, "Jumping the shark" just jumped the shark. Whoops. Meme's up.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Sunday, February 22, 2004 - 01:30 AM
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