Consummate Professionals

Since I deactivated my membership at an LIC climbing gym, I have spent a negligible amount of time in Queens, at most. Last August, however, my friend John and I, with a couple other friends either time, found ourselves in the largest borough by surface area twice in a week.

For a concert and some tennis, we popped up at the only two venues to ever host the U.S. Open tennis tournament. The Friday evening, we had ventured off to Forest Hills to see Odesza, and Tuesday we saw Nadal in Arthur Ashe Stadium.

While Queens has some 1.5 times as many residents as Manhattan, it feels like Manhattan is where one goes to work, to be professional.

Arthur Ashe Stadium is self-evidently named for Arthur Ashe, who won the first U.S. Open of the so-called “open era” and remains the only Black man to have won the tournament. He did this in Forest Hills Stadium in 1968, the first year that “professionals” were allowed to compete in the tournament. To that point, what we know as the U.S. Open had been the United States National Championships and had been restricted to amateurs, people who ostensibly weren’t doing this for work, weren’t getting their bread for it.

After 1968, professionals and amateurs competed in what we now call the Grand Slams together, for handsome cash prizes. These same athletes can compete in the Olympics, itself once also reserved as the realm of amateurs.

Arthur Ashe had competed on the amateur tour before the open era, though we would probably have called him and his peers professionals. Today, in tennis and in other individual sports, the line between amateur and professional retains some blurriness. Golf clubs often have a resident pro, the professional, but this person seldom if ever competes in the types of tournaments that people like me would associate with the term “professional.”

Yet, when a guy like Rinky Hijikata takes the first set off Nadal, there’s a sense that some dude, some amateur, has come and gotten in between our guy and his work. The crowd, seldom as reserved at Arthur Ashe as at Centre Court, say, had its interest piqued. Rinky fed off growing buzz and energy, emoting more and more as it became clear he would take the first set.

Then, Nadal, calm, cool, and collected, roared back to finish over the next three straight. Hijikata took some games here and there and hit his fair share of winners, but, from where I sat as a spectator, it became clear that his time had passed. While it wasn’t exactly quick work, Nadal made methodical work and proceeded through the balance of the match in a business-like manner. It was extremely satisfying to watch, even if it lacked the energy and amazement the upstart promised.

Fans love college basketball because they like to root for the underdog, and they like when the unexpected happens. It’s unfashionable to root for Duke, the perennial overdog. In tennis, however, there’s no shame in advertising Nadal or Federer as one’s favorite player. For my part, I tend to root against the underdog, because upsets always take longer, and it’s not a brief sport to begin with. In tennis, I take joy less from the unexpected or the storyline than from the smooth ease, the simple effectiveness with which the favorites place their shots and glide about the court. It’s a game of grit, sure, but also of grace and ease, something college basketball has never been accused of.

Toward the end of the match, one of my friends turned to me and whispered something along the lines of “god, this guy is just such a professional.”

A few days before, the show at Forest Hills was an awful lot louder and brighter than it had been in any of those pre-1977 tournaments. In its second life as one of my favorite live music venues, Forest Hills has hosted more fireworks than most small municipalities.

There are acts that play there because the outdoor breeze fits their laidback vibe, there are acts that play there because they’re not ready for somewhere bigger, and there are acts that play there because most arenas, let alone theaters, would quake at the sight of their pyrotechnics.

Odesza is the latter. Something on Pitchfork mentions that their 2019 A Moment Apart tour required several tractor trailers for their set, their drum line’s equipment, and their colossal bag of fire tricks.

During a lull in the show, my roommate Alex leaned over to me. “How the hell do you pitch something like this?!” he yelled. How do you drum up the capital for thousands and thousands of dollars in fireworks? How do you explain that, yes, your music is great, but the people at the show are going to be, um, especially captivated by fire and explosives?

The show boiled down to drums and fire, with a few bright lights and melodies thrown in for good measure. Drums and fire was basically all it took to put on a hell of a show. When I noted this to Ben, he reminded me that basically everybody in human history had known this for a long time.

I’m not sure what it looks like to rehearse for a tour like this, with two DJs, a trombonist, a few live singers, a twelvish person-strong drum line, and lots of lasers, but I can’t imagine they do the fire every time.

However they do it, it was evident after just a song or two that they practice a whole lot. The drum line came out, and before I could ask what was up with their helmets, they started dodging flames coming at them from either side, while keeping exactly to the beat.

The whole show is so perfectly dialed, so neatly staged, that it feels chemically induced. Online music reviews seldom make me happy, but the complaints they post about the duo on Pitchfork focus on this idea that there’s not enough tension in the music, not enough conflict. Roughly translated, the grievance is that it’s too smooth and doesn’t suck enough. They’re giving their audience exactly what the audience wants.

People show up to these shows with their Odesza tattoos and their glitter and their outfits, knowing what they are here for. We come for the driving beat, the singable hooks, the dancing, the fireworks. All I could say after was good lord that is just a great show.

Tellingly, Alex’s question came from curiosity about the business side of this thing. The music, we agreed, took care of itself. Electronic music is already computer generated, a far cry from the imperfections of somebody improvising on a hand-made instrument. On the other end of the spectrum might have sat the Grateful Dead, noodling and floating about in fundamentally human, imperfect ways.

While the Dead are known as one of the best live acts of all time, their off days, though less discussed, were no less numerous. The euphoria of ascending with a jam band is something special, but the joy of witnessing a fully dialed EDM show is something else, and when the jam bands miss, they miss hard.

In the early 2000s, I was introduced to celebrity culture via grocery stores and the covers of People Magazine or Us Weekly. They capitalized on the end of monoculture, when regular people like you and me wanted to get to know the same fifteen A listers, and know them personally. Celebrities, these magazines asserted, were just people. They were just like us. I’m not immune to this. Every time I go to Joe’s Pizza I like to look around at which famous people came there, and I have parasocial relationships with a few skiers on instagram.

In Queens, though, watching Nadal and Odesza, I decided I don’t care about this. The tennis and the concert each had its peculiar form of magic. Nadal came from behind and dispatched the job like a surgeon, while Odesza distilled and canned the most dopamine I’ve ever gotten legally. These acts are nothing like us, nothing at all. I am good at my job, but I am nowhere near as good at that as Odesza is at producing oohs and ahhs.

Professionalism in Manhattan though, plays out a bit differently. There’s a Midtown vest uniform and a dearth of face tattoos, for one. Referring to people as either very professional or very unprofessional is generally a bad idea, coming as it does from some deeply held biases and standing in as coded language for some, ahem, other grievances.  When these people say "professional" they don't mean being the best at your job and trademarking your Nike headband, but rather they mean conforming.

The Manhattan brand of professionalism is the ordinary salary man kind, where the shirts are white and pressed and the opinions are congruent with the party line. This is not without its merits, as I’m not sure I want my lawyer to have a dry, sardonic wit and a shit-eating grin, and the wheels of big business tend to roll easier without too many unique little points sticking out.

That said, there’s no fewer than a dozen car commercials about people going with the group, staying professional with the flow, and then deciding that enough his enough and turning around, full of excitement and energy after embracing and running toward imperfection. This is just a commercial ploy, and I’m not going to buy the cars, but I like it.

Selvedge denim is made primarily of the cloth closest to the end, where imperfections are more likely to be found. This is typically more expensive, and of course the best kind comes from Japan. The idea is that by coveting imperfection, it’s easier to have a pair of jeans that is uniquely flawed, a reflection of oneself.

Nadal is not my favorite tennis player, and Odessa is a show I love, but hardly my favorite live act. They’re each at the top of their professions, and they’re deliciously unlike you and me, but there’s just not much to latch on to with all that smoothness.

Last weekend, some ten months after this diatribe started, I went again to Bonnaroo, the grungiest and largest music festival I’ve experienced. Some acts, like Marcus Mumford and Kendrick Lamar, showed up as pre-established, single names, commanding high prices. They showed up, did their job, and scored pretty well. Then, they went home. Odesza happened to appear too, and they threw in a couple special flourishes and “what’s up Bonnaroo!!”s but put on largely, as expected, the same show I’d seen last August.

Every pack of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos tastes the same, even if the upper bound of packaged food flavor.

Over the whole weekend though, my group and those I spoke to, unanimously praised Cimafunk, a rapper with a funk and brass backing band from Cuba, as their favorite act of the weekend. Cimafunk showed up as a relative unknown to my friends and me like Rinky. Unlike Rinky, though, they put on a show as well ironed and professional as a big name, but with an added exuberance and spontaneity.

Cimafunk showed up to play. He and the band came to make sure we would all leave talking about them. They hit the bar that is the satisfaction of watching a professional operate a well-oiled machine, clearly taking pride in their work, but then they eclipsed it and sent the festival to a higher plane, playing imperfect music that is uniquely danceable, letting each of us participate in the show but wear our own jeans. They asked us what we liked and made a home cooked meal even better than our favorite.