Style: It's all a matter of taste
I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than spend time in Las Vegas, a town that gives electricity a bad name. I'd rather pound bamboo slivers under my nails than hand over a nickel of my hard-earned money to Lost Wages' one-armed bandits. Whoever called it gambling got it mixed up with giving.
So, what am I doing in Sin City, Nevada? Actually, I'm having a great time, as I have been for the last 20-odd years, each fall, when I attend the annual aftermarket extravaganza called the SEMA Show.
Yeah, I'd rather listen to an endless loop of Celine Dion's wails than cross the limits of the most bizarre city ever erected by mankind...but, when I'm given the chance to visit 9,100 different booths in one spot, during a single week, then I can't resist. I put on my blinders, make a mad dash up Interstate 15 for the Las Vegas Hilton and then try to venture out no further than the cavernous halls of the Convention Center next door.
At the 2003 show, more than 1,800 different exhibitors were spread among the multitude of booths, and the range of automotive-related products was staggering. There were also about 1,500 vehicles on display, bristling with new technology and, more often than not, a graphics scheme designed to wake the dead if not attract the eyes of the 100,000 or so attendees of the show.
With so much hoo-rah going on, the subtle approach gets lost. Hey, this is a city with, among other aesthetic delights, dueling pirate ships, an ersatz New York skyline, a facsimile of the Eiffel Tower, and a pyramid that beams a column of dazzling light into the eyes of any aliens circling overhead (remember, L.V. isn't too far from Area 51). Even the relatively staid Hilton has a Star Trek-themed restaurant. It has good food, but I made the mistake of congratulating our waiter on his Klingon mask, mistaking his "rugged" good looks for a theatrical prop.
So the SEMA Show, amidst all that action, can go overboard in its quest to get attention. New and exciting products aren't enough. Scantily clad "booth bimbos" sign posters of their scantily clad selves, famous race-car drivers sign posters of cars they drove, and the not so famous sit behind piles of posters waiting to be noticed. And then there are the "lurkers," who lie in ambush and dart out to pin a silly fuzzy object of some sort to your lapel. Not my favorite area of the show is the autosound hall. It's like having a sonic lobotomy. Thoughts are shoved back into your head before they can be expressed, and your eyesight blurs from the bass waves bouncing off the walls. I staggered through the section just long enough to see that if you don't have DVD screens in every corner of your car, then you deserve the contempt of your under-entertained children.
Each aisle of the show is like a cross between Aladdin's Cave and Pandora's Box. Great stuff (see our best picks of this year's SEMA products on pg. 92) abounds, but it's mixed in with really scary stuff. I'm amazed that there's someone out there who's just itching to buy such things as a "Day-Glo" colored chalk-based spray paint (called Car-Fiti) that lets you tag any car freely because it washes off. And how many orders did one wheel company get for its new 28-in.-yes, 28!-chromed monster for the Hummer?
Sure, I'd rather have a philosophical debate with Ozzy Osbourne than visit Nevada's most notorious city (Reno keeps trying), but when there are such beautiful cars as this month's Editors Choices, than I guess you know where to find me next fall.