The Times

I had a particularly bad migraine yesterday and I’m still feeling a bit nauseous, so just a bit of commentary about that article in The New York Times.

If you haven’t read it yet, I’d recommend it; it’s actually rather decent:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/26/style/horse-girls-breyerfest.html

I especially liked this paragraph – it makes BreyerFest sound so exotic and alluring:

If Breyerfest is the horse girl’s bacchanal, the nearby Clarion Hotel is its open bar, from which the ecstasy of material excess flows like wine. Throughout Breyerfest, the hotel transforms into a kind of Kowloon Walled City, in which dealers cram their rooms floor to ceiling with shelves of model horses and open their doors to the madding crowd.

If I wasn’t already a lifer, I’d be penciling BreyerFest into my 2019 itinerary right now!

Also, had I known The New York Times was milling about, I would have made the effort to get quoted! While it’s not necessarily something I’ve been looking to add to my “bucket list”, it would have made a nice bullet point on the Curriculum Vitae.

(I’ve been quoted in newspapers before, but nothing on that big of a stage.)

Although the hobby has gotten a lot of press over the years, most of it has been via regional newspapers and specialty periodicals (like Western Horseman); national press like this is a little out of the ordinary.

For the most part, this article was pretty respectful and with little in the way of the “Let’s ogle the oddballs!” framing that hobbies and other unique subcultures tend to get put into.

I do have a few other quibbles with the article, though.

The impression that the hobby itself is of more recent vintage, and generated by Breyer itself is frustrating. I know why they framed it this way – this is at its core a puff/promotional piece for Reeves – but no, not even.

This little hobby of ours has been around long enough that it’s become multigenerational. There were newsletters, live shows, and organizing bodies within the hobby proper over fifty years ago. It was hobbyists who were pestering Breyer to get more involved: that the industry exists as it does is largely in response to us!

BreyerFest is also essentially just an outgrowth of an earlier event – Model Horse Congress – that was originally organized by hobbyists for a couple of decades prior.

That Reeves gets to dictate how we get seen by the larger world is partly our fault; we’ve spent way too much time quibbling over incidental things and awarding each other prizes, rather than promoting the activity itself.

But I am in no mood to argue those points all over again. It’s time for this old “horse lady” to get herself to bed for the flea market tomorrow.