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I’m not a fan of Wicked vans. I don’t mind the idea of a car driving around with Garfield smoking a bong on the side of it, but to me Wicked Van art is just a bit too cheesy, the slogans a tad too offensive and imagination far too lacklustre. They’re basically made by kooks for kooks and perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than driving around in a Wicked Van is riding through Byron Bay on a Postie with Too Fast for Satan written down the side when the thing has a top speed of 40 kays an hour. That’s why my Postie is a wettie rack now instead of a valid form of transportation. Anyway, today we’re gonna make your car a feel good, anti-cop machine that inspires nothing but love and happiness. Don’t believe? Check it.
Step 1. On a recent trip to Brazil my buddy Pedro wanted me to decorate his car. Like most cars I’ve owned and/or painted, Pedro’s car was a total heap of shit. It didn’t have enough power to get up hills in any of the forward gears, meaning if he wanted to get anywhere one foot above sea level he had to drive there in reverse. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Rio, but the city is an endless maze of hills, so Pedro spends 50 per cent of his time on the road going backwards. Needless to say, he gets pulled over by the po po… a lot.
Step 2. I knew that with the right amount of anti-bad vibeness, we could get the fuzz to totally avoid Pedro and his caca mobile. When painting a car it’s important to have a few feel-good motifs, such as yin and yangs (for balance), rainbows (for shooting into fascism), the sun and the moon the stars (so you can navigate your way home if you get lost at sea without a compass) and the planet Saturn, or as it’s known in Hindu astrology, Shani – God of karma.
Step 3. Warning: If you only put positive motifs on your car, you’ll look the same as every other hippy wagon in Byron, so you gotta spice things up with centrepiece that nobody else will have. For Pedro I chose a blue haired, four eyed alien girl wearing orange polka dot Chalmers Pyjamas, praying to Shani that the car would be invisible to corrupt police all over Brazil ie: all the police in Brazil. You don’t have to do that though, you could do a unicorn riding a bicycle while eating an ice cream, or a nun riding a horse holding a spinning wheel, or a giant smiling mull leaf holding hands with Santa. Free your mind.
Step 4. The only way to truly know if your new wheels are feel good enough to be anti-cop is to take them on the road. Pedro and I raised the stakes even further by painting skulls on our faces, putting on Sepultura super loud and reverse driving all over Rio in the early hours of the morning. Plenty of cops drove past us, but not one stopped to see what we were doing. The love and happiness was clearly radiating.