U2 at Cowboys Stadium, Part 2

After more than sixteen hours of getting up early and waiting in a long line, one that promised and delivered a coveted spot in a hard-to-get-to circle, U2 was still not on stage. But another band was, and I listened through earplugs—all of us did, hoping to preserve our ears for the main event. What, after all, was the point of coming to a U2 concert and having my eardrums blown by the opening act?

Muse was not bad, even through sound barriers, but the venue was stunning. Throughout the show I could not get over this place and this stage. Before this I had only seen Cowboys Stadium from the outside, a Noah's ark designed for outer space. Inside, however, the sheer amount of space contained within its walls made me seem a microscopic speck. And the stage brought a mass to match its host. A giant spider over multitudes of people, the concert stage for the 360 Tour covered more than half of the stadium floor. We found out from stagehands that transporting it requires 99 eighteen-wheelers and setting it up takes four days. It was certainly the guest of honor, a platform to fit the stature of its creators.

But this event was about a band, not a building, and U2 soon took the stage. As long as the wait had been—nearly 17 hours from the time I woke up—seeing them still felt surreal. This band that I had listened to for so long and seen on TV so often was only yards away. At one point, Bono was right above me on a bridge, at another he was five feet away. Clearly, everyone else felt the same way. The band's appearance turned the pit into a photo shoot. Whenever a band-member came near the outer part of the stage, hundreds of camera-phones sprang up like weeds. If the inner circle was a garden, Bono was definitely its rain.

The music began, and the earplugs came out. Now, deafness was worth the risk. At least my eardrums would die happily. The band opened with three songs off the new album, No Line on the Horizon. They would go on to play three more No Line songs, and almost all of them sounded underwhelming to me: they lacked the focus needed to command such a vast sound-space

But they did not linger there for long. "Mysterious Ways" came fourth and brought a bonus with it. To end the song, Bono sang the chorus of the Beatles' "Blackbird." This adding-on occurred multiple times throughout the night, and produced my favorite moments of the concert. Not only was "Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" the clearest song of the night, and my favorite, but also Bono ended it with "Stand By Me" by the Righteous Brothers. As he sang the chorus, he held out his microphone to the crowd, and over 70,000 voices sang in unison. Later in the night, another surprise would top this one. Bono sang "Amazing Grace" as an intro to "Where the Streets Have No Name." For a moment, a football stadium felt like a cathedral.

Two hours and two encores later, our evening would come to a close. To be fair, there were some things I disliked about the show. The two videos that played while we waited for encores were irritating. Then there was the steering wheel microphone that Bono used as a rope swing. As impressive as his physical abilities were, the concert had reached its climax, and this device was a distraction. In addition, songs that I love were passed up. I greatly missed not hearing "Bad" and "Pride," and would love to have heard their thundering rendition of the Beatles' "Helter Skelter," but that one will probably never happen. When set lists come from three decades of music, some disappointment is inevitable.

Regardless of this nitpicking, I will never forget this concert. By the time I made it to bed, I had been awake for 21 and a half hours, had spent most of the day in a long line, and had to struggle in order to stay where I had spent all day trying to get. Though I can't say I would turn around and do it all over again, I know that I sensed something larger than myself. Calling it sacred would not be the right word, but I can still hear tens of thousands singing in unison. I can still hear the sound of "Amazing Grace." Grace has a way of speaking through common things, like music.




Set List: Cowboys Stadium (10/12)

Breathe

Get on Your Boots

Magnificent 

Mysterious Ways

Beautiful Day

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Stuck In A Moment

No Line on the Horizon

Elevation

Until The End of the World

Unforgettable Fire

City of Blinding Lights

Vertigo

I'll Go Crazy - Remix

Sunday Bloody Sunday

MLK

Walk On


One

Where The Streets Have No Name



Ultraviolet

With or Without You

Moment of Surrender

U2 at Cowboys Stadium, Part I

It's last Friday night; I'm sitting on my couch, reading a book turning more and more bizarre; and a friend calls with an out-of-the-blue: two extra tickets to the U2 concert at Cowboys Stadium. Now it's Monday morning, and my alarm's making a proclamation: 4:30 a.m. In spite of the hour, I am prepared—well, as prepared as one can be with a 4 a.m. frame of mind. See, this ungodly gong has gone off because my friends with the extra tickets have invited my wife and I along on their mad-mission: getting into the "inner circle" of the U2 stage by getting in line while it's still dark out. Now, it's just after 6 a.m., and in spite of my sleep-deprived stupor, I am in line for a U2 concert. A weekend that had originally held all the promise of a book and some drizzle has now evolved into a four-day holiday, culminating in a date on a "Space Ship" with one of the world's most famous musical acts.

We arrive in line and discover an officially unofficial, fan-initiated tracking system that is in place to manage the day ahead of us. This plan consists of a sharpie pen and some scratch paper. I am the 110th fan in line. In spite of such rudimentary materials, the system works wonders. For the simple fact that a plan is in place, everyone feels at ease. We no longer have to live in the uncertainty of whether our early arrival is going to be rewarded or not. We have a spot. Of course there will be people who try to cut, but we have been instructed to get to know the people around us. This way we can identify the invaders when they arrive. Even better, as soon as we assume our spot, we can feel an atmosphere of solidarity around us. We're in this together. Carry each other.

Though we would not hear a note of live music until 14 hours later, in this line there was never a dull moment. Fourth in line was "Tattoo Dan," a category manager at a Nike store in New York, who has been attending U2 concerts regularly since 1987 and has been invited on stage multiple times. Just behind us in line was a husband and wife from Australia, who referred to lining up before the show as "cue-ing"; on the current tour, they have already seen shows in California and Arizona, and eagerly anticipate the next leg of the tour, when U2 comes to the outback.

These fans were not only interesting but also affable. In my 27 years of life, in which I have now attended a meager 17 pop music concerts, I have never encountered such a civil set of fans. Few attempted to sneak a closer spot (though a few early-risers held spots for their spouses, who showed up after sleeping in). Few late-arrivers expressed discontent over their spot. When we began to receive wristbands to confirm our status—literally, the last minute before admittance—I saw no one trying to move up in the line. Even as we began our endless descent to the floor of the stadium, few ran to get ahead. A spirit of common grace seemed to have descended upon us all. As Bono would surely have put it, love had come to town. On the floor in the moments that follow, this spirit will prove concert-saving.

Now it's nearly 5 p.m., and we're finally in. Minutes later, after my friends and I have found the floor, made our way into the long-awaited inner circle, and located a spot on the back rail, just right of center-stage, Event Staffers begin telling us, all 200 of us, to leave the inner ring. Organizers are admitting groups of 200, one at a time. We are the first, and now they want us to exit the area. This is no joke. You must leave. This area is not for those with blue bracelets. You must return to the general standing area. To make matters worse, approximately six police officers are at hand, ready to enforce whatever The White Shirts say. But here's the clincher: even though many of our fellow fans have occupied the enclosed part of the stage at previous shows on this very tour, Event Staff is neither listening nor explaining why.

Tempers explode. With personnel refusing to listen, what started as reasonable pleading devolves into legal threats. So, as policemen prepare to escort some off the premises, the rest of us begin to consider our options. A few run for the best remaining spots. Others begin to drift in that direction. Most of these fans, however, are die-hards. They stay put, because they know better.

After about five furious minutes, three consecutive events occur that will save the day. First, as soon as the party poopers show up, our more experienced friends all move into sitting position, making it clear that they will have to be dragged away. Second, to support those of us still standing, the fans that have chosen a spot outside the inner circle begin urging us to stay: Don't leave. Don't leave. Finally, a second set of 200 fans comes crashing into the inner area, doubling our numbers. The policemen decide to leave and Event Staff follows close behind. Their retreat means our survival, and the cheers of 400 fans cry victory. When a day in line was about to be lost, fan solidarity rallied to win the day. Now with our spot secured, all that remained was an upright wait of three hours and the concert experience of a lifetime.

American Pastoral: Philip Roth rages against the machine

In American Pastoral (1997), Philip Roth uses three major sections to tell the remembrance, the fall and the loss of the paradise-like life of Seymour "The Swede" Levov. I say paradise-like because the ultimate concern of this novel is to reveal that what its protagonist once enjoyed was never really a paradise, only a delusion of one. And Roth channels all his creative powers towards achieving this "eye-opening" end.

All that really lies at the bottom of this book, however are the embittered beliefs of its author—that man is an irrational animal, determined by social forces, whose defining trait is selfishness. Pretending things can be otherwise will can only lead to a bomb exploding in your backyard or a fork landing in your eyeball. This is how Roth envisions domestic America.

Roth's announcement comes as nothing new. Almost a century ago, Joseph Wood Krutch said that because society no longer believes in noble men, nobility no longer exists. Writing in The Modern Temper (1929), Krutch says, "We can no longer tell tales of the fall of noble men because we do not believe that noble men exist. The best that we can achieve is pathos and the most that we can do is to feel sorry for ourselves. Man has put off his royal robes and it is only in sceptered pomp that tragedy can come sweeping by." Though he was trying to identify new territory for modern tragic drama, Krutch offers some insight into the fiction of Roth.

As Krutch admits, literature loses its grandeur under this new outlook. If man has nothing greater in him than an animal, all his loss can achieve is pathos. American Pastoral adheres to this theory. In spite of all of Roth's thundering, which at times can be quite resounding, all one can feel for Levov is pathos. In other words, Sorry Swede. You were dealt this. So you can't help it. Good luck to you. Roth finds nothing more to admire in his hero than the best cultural conditioning of a dried out day. The novel awakens Swede to this fact and leaves him there, broken and boiling.

All this would be just fine, if such psychological critics did not insist that their assumptions be taken as absolute and universal. Mr. Krutch betrays such a perspective in his use of the first person plural voice. Simply put, he thinks he speaks for all. In spite of his claims, another view, albeit an unpopular one, still survives in literary criticism and among aspiring authors.

Writing more than a decade after Krutch, the great literary critic F.O. Matthiessen hints at it. Though his immediate topic concerns the history of allegory, Matthiessen concludes this long passage from American Renaissance (1941) by suggesting that literature occupies more territory than what many of its practitioners are currently treading:

Today we have felt an even greater necessity to be on guard against the abstractions of allegory. For after the ruminations of Tennyson, which allowed poetry to escape into mere idealization, it was imperative to get back to the poetry of sensation, of dramatic immediacy. This need called into being Eliot's work, as well as our revival of Donne and our increasing taste for Baudelaire. But in our satisfaction with the dramatic lyrics of these poets, there is the danger, as Eliot has already realized in his own later work, that in exalting the poetry of sensation, we may overlook that we are also prolonging the circumspection of poetry's scope which came in with Coleridge and Keats. With the romantic movement, poetry tended, in spite of Wordsworth's prefaces, to become divorced from "knowledge," which, with the drift of the nineteenth century, became more and more the special province of science. As a result we have lost living touch with the great poetry of contemplation; we have almost forgotten in our own practice that poetry can deal with epistemology, as Dante showed in his exposition of the soul in Purgatorio.

Perhaps I am overextending his meaning, but Matthiessen seems to believe that literature still possesses an untapped power, one that believes in a human soul—hence, one that can recover the lost nobility of the human race. What I would call its Image of God. It is a view that underlies the Western Literary Tradition, and contemporary novelists such as Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, and Mark Helprin seem—in their different ways—to be at least reconsidering, if not practicing it.

I wouldn't avoid Roth altogether; he is certainly one force to be reckoned with. But if you're looking for something more than 400+ pages of repressed anger, I'd recommend that you start somewhere else.

#1: The Rat

"The rat of course I rate first. He lives in your house without helping you to buy it or build it or repair it or keep the taxes paid; he eats what you eat without helping you raise it or buy it or even haul it into the house; you cannot get rid of him; were he not a cannibal, he would long since have inherited the earth."
—William Faulkner, The Reivers

#2: The Mule

"The mule I rate second. But second only because you can make him work for you. But that too only within his own rigid self-set regulations. He will not permit himself to eat too much. He will draw a wagon or a plow, but he will not run a race. He will not try to jump anything he does not indubitably know beforehand he can jump; he will not enter any place unless he knows of his own knowledge what is on the other side; he will work for you patiently for ten years for the chance to kick you once. In a word, free of the obligations of ancestry and the responsibilities of posterity, he has conquered not only life but death too and hence is immortal; were he to vanish from the earth today, the same chanceful biological combination which produced him yesterday would produce him a thousand years hence, unaltered, unchanged, incorrigible still within the limitations which he himself had proved and tested; still free, still coping."
—William Faulkner, The Reivers

#3: The Cat

"The cat is third, with some of the same qualities but a weaker, punier creature; he neither toils nor spins, he is a parasite on you but he does not love you; he would die, cease to exist, vanish from the earth (in his so-called domestic form) but so far he has not had to."
—William Faulkner, The Reivers

#4: The Dog

"The dog I rate fourth. He is courageous, faithful, monogamous in his devotion; he is your parasite too: his failure (as compared to the cat) is that he will work for you—I mean, willingly, gladly, ape any trick, no matter how silly, just to please you, for a pat on the head; as sound and first-rate a parasite as any, his failure is that he is a sycophant, believing that he has to show gratitude also; he will debase and violate his own dignity for your amusement; he fawns in return for a kick, he will give his life for you in battle and grieve himself to starvation over your bones."
—William Faulkner, The Reivers