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A great pickup game is hard to come by these days. When I have been uninjured and able I have been looking for them two or three times every week for years. So many things have to go right: you have to find enough space to play (easier said than done here), with enough other players willing to join a game (but not too many). The skill levels should be comparable. And people have to be nice to each other. In my experience this rarely happens. Often times it fails at the first hurdle — no fields, not enough people — and even when that is cleared the disparities in skill are too great or people bicker instead of playing.

Today by some miracle all of these conditions were present. Ten of us assembled and played on half of an Astroturf field for almost two hours. We dragged goals and set rules (no shots above the waist) and put cones up and picked even teams. Everybody wanted to be there. It doesn't happen often, but when the passes flow and everyone is having fun, the beautiful game purrs. The adrenaline I get when I play is the most exhilarating drug I know. You have to think creatively — how do I unpick this defense? Defend the goal from their attacks? — but not too much, lest you lose focus and the ball. If you succeed more often than not it will be a thing of beauty. And if you fail you get to try again and again and again. I wish more things in life were like this.

A good pickup game beats a good competitive game. The lower stakes mean that people are more likely to take risks, attempt tricks, make audacious plays. You can think more and practice playing in unfamiliar positions. Your mistakes (usually) aren't chastised. And the whole thing is so fleeting — you've found nine other strangers who all coincidentally showed up to the same place looking for the same fix, and now for an hour or two you all speak the same language, and then after it's over you probably won't see many of them ever again.

It brings a tear to my eye if I think about it too much. Whenever soccer goes well I reminisce by rewatching goal compilations of yore. Jack Wilshere's goal against Norwich is my favorite. (The first video on YouTube of this goal is set to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida". Never change.) The skill, the finesse, the speed to ping the ball back and forth so quickly the other team stands still! I get glimpses of this beauty in other sports, but never more than I do in the beautiful game.

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Tangentially related — I saw this article quoting Gianni Infantino, the corrupt sonuvabitch¹ at the helm of FIFA, talking about the dumpster fire that has been the Club World Cup:

We can say definitely that this FIFA Club World Cup has been a huge, huge, huge success. Of course, there are a lot of positives, some negatives.

We heard financially it would not work but I can say we generated over $2bn in revenues with this competition. We earned on average $33m per match. There is no other cup competition in the world that comes close to $33m per match. (...) It is already the most successful club competition in the world with all different measurements.

The first comment beneath the article read:

I remember as a young boy watching [Thierry] Henry doing his magic I said to myself "Look at him, he is generating so much revenue". That's why we love football. That's magic

I don't think I need to say any more than that.

Highlights

Cheong Fun Cart
159 Hester St, New York, NY 10013
It is kind of comical to me that a cart less than five square feet can get a health rating. How long does the inspection take? Even if you had any violations, it'd take about five minutes to clean up (i.e., throw any offending items/critters on the street). Anyway, an excellent, cheaper alternative to the half-hour wait at Yi Ji Shi Mo.

Kam Hing Coffee Shop
118 Baxter St, New York, NY 10013
One of my favorite spots in Chinatown. I liked the Thai tea flavor. Pineapple, not so much.

Deluxe Food Market
79 Elizabeth St, New York, NY 10013
Somehow I have never seen this place before, which Maps reviews are saying has been around for months. Pretty neat, though all the commotion and stuff to see in here awed me and earned me a few hollers in Cantonese. (This always amuses me because of course I never have any idea what they are yelling at me.)

The Little One
150 E Broadway, New York, NY 10002
Third time getting the hojicha kakigori now! Hidden gem indeed: none of my friends seem to have heard of this place. (Thanks, A.)

Earlier tonight I went to see Maye open the tour for her debut album Música Para Abrir El Cielo. This was a big moment for me. I have been listening to Maye since she broke out in 2020, she’s a perennial fixture in my Wrapped, and her most popular song is in the running for my favorite song of all time.

Anyway, it is a special thing to find an artist when they only have one or two songs and follow them long enough to see them live for the first time. Five years! That’s how long this moment has been in the making.

Five years wasn’t quite long enough, apparently. I dragged J¹ out to line up with me one hour before the concert was scheduled to start and we still had to wait three and a half hours before we actually glimpsed Maye. I wish venues (or artists, or whoever is responsible for this) would be more transparent about when concerts actually start. They let us in at 7 only to make us stand and wait under blacklight in a packed room for an entire hour before the first opener came out. Without much space to stretch and move, my calves ached and my feet had fallen asleep before the first opener arrived.

Between rising ticket prices/fees and me having less money to spend, pop concerts are becoming an increasingly rare event on my calendar. My budget limits me to lesser-known artists like Maye who charge less for a ticket than a (concert) t-shirt. I realized today that if these artists succeed and hit the mainstream, I likely won't be able to afford to see them the next time they come around.

So when an artist I like is performing in town on a day I'm free and can afford the tickets it feels like the stars have aligned. I am still miffed when I can't go see the SZAs or the Kendricks of the world and imagine I always will be. But I also find much to love about these artists that haven't quite made it big yet. They're not quite used to the fame and adulation in a way I find humanizing. Their performances are more intimate and less manicured, their mannerisms less practiced, their fans more devoted. Plus, today J and I stood ten feet away from Maye. We were the tenth party to get in line. J, who is used to concerts with bigger names, found the experience of going to a concert with so few other people surreal. As someone who listens to more indie music, I'm more used to it than he is, and it still amazes me if I think about it. Here I am standing and waiting for almost four hours with 300 other people in a city of eight million. It's an open secret in a city that specializes in finding and ruining them.

I had a lot of questions before this concert. Are there going to be openers? Who’s going to open for an artist this small? (None of my friends know who Maye is.) How long is her set going to be? After all, you can listen to her entire discography in an hour.

There were indeed openers. La Cassandra came out first, before Fernando Osorio, Maye’s Grammy-award winning dad, wowed us with a few original songs on acoustic guitar. I need to do some digging and listen to the songs he wrote for stars like Celia Cruz and Luis Fonsi (yes, you read that right).

La Cassandra

(After the concert as we spilled out onto the sidewalk outside, I bumped into La Cassandra on my way to the subway. I hadn't heard of her before tonight, but where else can you get this kind of experience? You're not running into SZA's openers on the way home.)

At long last Maye showed up in a trenchcoat, minishorts, stiletto boots, and white shirt with pink necktie to match her hair. Cool fit and all, but aren't you hot...? Cold? Or just generally uncomfortable?

The outfit did not keep her from showing out for the better part of an hour, and I enjoyed every minute. I especially loved hearing the band put new twists on songs I had listened to so many times, listening to novel interludes morph into familiar hits. Maye is great live. I think she has the personality, star power, and musical talent to really take off in the next few years. Sad as I might be imagining the day I won't be able to go to her concerts, I will keep rooting for her and listening to all her songs on repeat. But for now this memory is mine. I will savor it to the fullest.

Fernando Osorio, Maye's father

Occasionally I find myself frustrated by how little I can remember from the concerts I've been to. I can often remember the moments leading up to and following the performance quite vividly, but when it comes to the performance itself — you know, the part I actually paid money for — my mind usually draws a blank.

I have been thinking about this more recently, this desire of mine to remember every little detail. I'll catch myself trying my best to commit every little detail to memory — how the drummer played, what shoes the opener was wearing, what songs were played in what order — and I fear this kind of attention — my thinking, noticing brain — is at odds with enjoying myself, which begs the question: which do I care about more? Would I prefer to lose myself at a concert and remember nothing more than a vaguely warm impression that I had a good time? Or would I rather have a clearer memory to look back on at the expense of feeling in the moment?

Strangely enough, what I want is not what I have: I want the crystal clear memory; I usually end up with just the warm fuzzies. I used to judge (a little) people who filmed entire concerts on their phones. You did so much to get in front of your favorite artist and you want to watch them through a screen? Are you ever going to go back and watch these awful videos? The older I get the more understandable this choice seems. I've never gone back and watched any of the videos I've taken at concerts, but I imagine it would be nice to relive even a little bit of it, or feel like you have the option to do so. (When Google Photos used to offer unlimited storage I felt like I could capture and remember so much more.) Perhaps this tempts me because it is hard to quantify (or even feel, sometimes) what is lost when you aren't entirely present.

Maye in all her glory

P.S. If you are a regular reader of the blog and haven't taken my readership survey yet, please do! The responses so far have been so touching and I would love to get more. Thank you to those of you that have already done it. I have read all the responses and will go through the recommendations in more detail when things calm down a bit.

P.P.S. You will never regret bringing and wearing earplugs to a concert. Never. Especially if you end up in the second row as you are wont to do right in front of the speakers blasting bass so loud you can feel each wave like your heartbeat.