Weblog Sin Pies

By Dave Stefani

Suddenly your crazy uncle Floyd is cool again. You know the guy I’m talking about: the involuntary bachelor with the duct-taped lawn chairs in his kitchen, the milk-crate TV stand, and the ironing-board “coffee table.” The one who has a garage full of junk that he’s been hording since 1962 because you never know when you’ll need 37 axe heads and an Edsel fender. Just when you thought uncle Floyd’s brand of frat-boy engineering could never be fashionable, along comes ReadyMade, a ridiculous magazine wherein a bunch of young, beautiful, bored hipsters, with obviously too much time on their hands, go out of their way (way out of their way) to devise alternative uses for everyday items. In a self-congratulatory display of privileged white guilt, the contributors to this rag celebrate the types of barnyard engineering that 10 years ago they themselves would have turned their noses up at. But now that arts and crafts are suddenly hip, we all have to be plagued by Urban Outfitters-clad idiots showing us 32 different ways to use a vinyl tablecloth.

Hey, it’s not that I’m against recycling. By all means, reuse, recycle, take some strain off the planet. But half the projects in this magazine involve going out and buying a bunch of new shit in order to achieve these cutesy attempts at “rethinking” an object’s place in the world.

For instance, one segment shows the reader how to spend $15 on seven different items in order to make a “found object” bird feeder out of office supplies and bathroom fixtures. Wow, a trip to the hardware store, $15, seven items, and I can construct my own birdfeeder? Hey, here’s an idea: If I’m going to the hardware store anyway, why don’t I spend my $15 on one item: a birdfeeder.

Or what about the guy who came up with the Bicycle Wheel Lazy Susan? I can just imagine his thought process: “I know, I’ll take my love of riding bicycles and juxtapose it with my utter disdain for having to reach eight inches across the dinner table and bam, conversation starter! The chicks will love it.” No, jerkoff, the chicks will not love it, and any conversation that it starts will go something like this:

“Hey, do you have a flat tire or something?”
“No.”
“Then why do you have a fucking bicycle wheel on your kitchen table?”
“It’s my Bicycle Wheel Lazy Susan. I invented it myself. And it only cost me about 15 bucks to make.”
“If you really wanted to recycle something, why didn’t you just go down to the thrift store and spend 3 bucks on an actual Lazy Susan?”
“Because…”
“Because you’re an idiot.”

You see, in their unapologetic attempts to dazzle us with ingenuity, the contributors to this magazine have forgotten about one important element: taste. Or in their case, bad taste. Look people, just because you can attach two wire hangers to a colander and call it a plant hanger doesn’t mean you should. That’s like poking holes in the bottom of your flower pot the next time you want to make spaghetti. And just because some 24-year-old, floppy-haired man-boy in velcro sneakers comes up with an asinine re-envisioning of the houseware department, it doesn’t suddenly make it worthy of a whole magazine. It certainly isn’t worthy when all these bullshit projects are being used only as a vehicle for companies to advertise their overpriced kitsch to a bunch of disenchanted hipsters. “Wow, with all the money I saved turning a paint can into a hose hanger I can afford to buy that $75 garden gnome holding a machine gun.” Marcel Duchamp is turning over in his grave.