'Ah, but there are three hundred and sixty four unbirthdays!'

I traveled to London over the weekend for my birthday, and I know I travel to London a lot but I don't usually stay over so it felt like a real treat! It was all a bit last minute so I wasn't really sure what to do outside of shows I had booked, but I had a lot of fun.

I went to the Tate Britain a few months ago and absolutely loved it, and was kind of hoping to do something that would inspire me like that again and recapture that feeling, so I decided to go to the Tate Modern. I know, it's in the name, but I thought I'd been before and liked it, but I guess I got it mixed up with another gallery. There's some stuff that falls under the banner of 'modern art' that I really love such as surrealism (René Magritte is one of my all time favorite artists) and I guess that's the kind of thing I was hoping for, but it was predominantly the type of modern art that I really hate and I spent the whole time stomping through the exhibits and pouting. Modern art is pretentious, classist, ableist (and often racist) garbage, purely made so rich people can feel smug about how much smarter they are because they 'get it'. And it makes me genuinely angry as someone with an arts degree who is struggling to make it in the illustration industry, an industry that's becoming less and less viable even for my friends who are already well established within it and are having to get part time jobs to make ends meet because illustration is becoming more and more devalued. Knowing full well that I and many other illustrators pour hours and hours into a single piece, while some white person with a trust fund goes dumpster diving and applies some bs fake woke meaning to whatever trash they find and it gets lapped up by all of the other yuppies and they pay thousands for it. It makes me so mad because it's so unfair! And it just proves that art isn't about skill or hard work, it's about connections and class. So yeah, I don't like modern art and it ended up feeling like a big waste of time. They did have one Magritte and one Dali so that was nice, but definitely not worth traveling all of that way for!

Instead I decided to go back into the city center and spent my time browsing all of the book shops and record stores. I used to be really into record collecting and had almost 1000 of them at one point, but then I sold them all and it paid for me to go to New York and see 4 shows on Broadway which put the hobby into perspective. But for the past couple of months I haven't been able to walk by an HMV store without going in to touch the MCR records wistfully, and I kind of want to get back into it. Not like I used to, it became a really toxic part of my life where I was getting lectured and patronized by old men on the internet and I felt like I had to have the 'right' pressings and collect the 'right' musicians to be seen as a valid part of the community. Musical taste is something so deeply personal, and mine is kind of eclectic and not very expansive and I hated being made to feel guilty for that when I just wanted to hyperfocus on my favorite bands. Purging myself of that whole collection and the performance it had become felt so therapeutic, even more so by using that money to do something I'd always wanted. I never intended for my record collection and dress style to become my entire personality (and also why I barely post outfit photos anymore despite the fact I still love dressing up!) and I really came to resent absolutely everything about it, and it's only recently that I've been able to recover from that and rediscover some of these interests again on my own terms.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot recently, and now I'm getting into Elvis I just feel like it's time. I don’t even own a record player at the moment, but there’s just something so compelling about collecting physical media of your favorite things. And really it’s not just the vinyl itself, but the artwork and the sleeve and the whole experience. So I decided to just go for it on a bit of a whim, and it's honestly made me so happy and I'm really excited to get back into this, and just buy the stuff that means the absolute world to me. And these are what I got in London!

As for shows, I saw The Phantom of the Opera on my actual birthday (of course I did!), and I originally was hoping to see Wicked too but because it was last minute and a Saturday the seats were not good so I decided to do something a bit different and went for a play instead and saw Life Of Pi. I've never read the book it's based on, only seen the movie and that was so long ago I'd forgotten most of the gist of it but I really liked it a lot! There's a lot of puppetry and light effects so I really got lost in it. I did keep expecting them to sing though.