So Summer Hayes broke the news on her blog that the 2010 My Little Pony Fair will be in Louisville, KY. (Good news for her as she is local!) You can read her post about this here. Now, I’m sure they have covered this somewhere on some forum but I don’t know where and the website is a bit busted right now so this is, quite literally, all the info I have for you.
I have nothing against Kentucky but I for one am really confused. At the 2008 convention, the fair staff said they had a contract to hold the convention in Las Vegas for the next 5 years. Unless I am having a math fail moment, they only held it there once so far.
I didn’t go to the convention in LV last year because I figured I had 4 more years to catch it there. Now, I don’t particularly care about going to Vegas and I think it’s more interesting to have it somewhere different each year than the same place for 5 years straight. My husband is kinda bummed, though, since I told him he could play Blackjack as long as I could buy ponies with all his winnings which was a plan he was oddly psyched about.
So I have to ask you, what do you think? Are you bummed that they changed the location? Were you psyched about a return to Vegas?
Do you know why the heck they changed their minds?
Montambo is one of the winners of our recent giveaway of the book on Goodreads so she’s set the bar pretty high for future reviewers!
You can enjoy the original review here but in case it gets deleted, I’m reprinting it below for your benefit.
Summer Hayes is a literary genius.
I was planning on reading this, but first I wanted to buy a copy of The Cambridge Companion to The My Little Pony 2007-2008 Collector’s Inventory, so that I understood the manifold literary-historical allusions and the stream-of-consciousness narration.
Jürgen Habermas wrote an interesting essay on Summer Hayes’ oeuvre a few years back in which he posited My Little Pony as a forcible diminution and reappropriation of the male’s psychosexual privilege in Western culture. He further describes an orange, purple-maned, doe-eyed pony as a ‘folding-over-upon-itself’ of the traditional hegemonic phallocentric aggression we find sublimated in our modes of commerce and social exchange. He also says he likes to comb their hair and kiss them before night-night.
I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t note that my favorite work in the Summer Hayes canon is The My Little Pony G1 Collector’s Inventory: An Unofficial Full Color Illustrated Collector’s Price Guide to the First Generation of MLP Including All US Ponies, Playsets and Accessories Released Before 1997, in which she collaborates with the highly underrated Kimberly Shriner, who succeeds in tempering some of Hayes’ most gratuitously high-modern tendencies. Also, this is the first Hayes/Shriner work to address the problematic relationship between accessories/playsets and the notion of subjective pony-selfness which has so confounded post-structuralist thought (see Foucault, for instance); what’s most interesting is that Hayes and Shriner define the All-That-Which-Is-Other-Than-My-Little-Pony as ‘accessory’ and not integral to a symbiotic exchange between subjective ideation and so-called ‘objective’ context. Many little post-equine philosophers have rightly challenged this compartmentalized view, but the Pony/Accessories paradigm offers a rather nice model for isolating a subjective notion of subjectivity itself, as demarcated, for instance, from the My Little Pony Rainbow Corral playset.
Let us not for a minute neglect that fateful modification ‘my little’ in which, firstly, ownership and, then, diminishment are asserted — which purposefully counterpoises egotism (the appropriation of Other) with an implied lacking or insufficiency (little being less than that which is regarded as the normative manifestation of a fixed – or central — ideation); My Little Pony is therefore defined by its belongingness to or of me (or as an accessory to a grounded a priori self, which is both apart from and the cipher which enters into the strategy of poniness on my behalf) and by its devaluation according to an acknowledged standard inherited by the self from the obscure collaboration of accessory identity (or ‘Otherness’). Thus, the tension which is essential to the MLP claim to existence (or, non-ontologically, to ‘mere’ expression) always already threatens to overcome and undermine the very motivations of that claim, thereby alluding to the futility of possession and the frustrated drive aspiring to transcendent satiation.
Massive bonus points if you can comment in the same style and refute/support the arguments presented!
While the 1980s had those plastic mask costumes (which I weirdly cannot find a picture of anywhere, what’s the deal with that internet?), Hasbro has yet to come out with an official My Little Pony costume for the generation of ponies currently in stores.
However, that would never stop pony fans of all ages from dressing up as an MLP for Halloween! Some intrepid and crafty people have created costumes themselves and are selling them only. I’ve complied a small gallery below of some I liked.
While the ones on eBay are trying to be more like official My Little Pony figures, if you don’t mind modifying what you buy a bit, there are a wide variety of Unicorn costumes for children and adults alike. Just sew a symbol or cutie mark on and suddenly you have your very own My Little Pony costume.
Don’t have time or the cash to buy a costume? Make your own My Little Pony costume! Here are three homemade My Little Pony costumes to give you inspiration.
