“Because you feel like you’re in church.”

Interesting profile of the home built by former U2 show director Bruce Ramus: A temple framed by nature and rock ‘n roll. If it seems off topic here to you, think again. This section, and several others, profoundly echo what goes into making a transformative liturgical experience: Immediately after a U2 show, they’d spend hours examining five videos that had been shot of every song and segue, and they’d deliberate on what worked and what didn’t. Their work ethic made him look at his life holistically. “It was really their approach that made me pay attention — not specifically the lighting or sound or where they were standing on stage, but the exchange. That’s kind of what I learned on U2, to pay attention to how the exchange affects us on a profound level, whether it’s music or art, or architecture. That kind of opened the door for me..... I wanted to create a work of art that I could live in."

Sound and Light

The folks over at Interference asked if I might expand my comments here on the Claw into a brief article for them. If you'd like to read the results, here they are. Thanks guys! Thanks also to @U2 for linking the same U2 Sermons material in this week's OTR.

Es Ist Rot

And while I'm having fun, my favorite sincere Twitter moment from last night (winner in the comedy genre was "Kinder mit Masken auf dem catwalk. Kein Kommentar.") I had been reading earlier in the day about the neurophysiology of ritual, and the author remarked how neurologically vital it was, if a sense of awe were to be experienced by participants, for ritual to carry patterned, permanence-evoking repetition of visuals and movement. Yeah.

architecture class

I should have added this last night: the lights and so on on the top spire on the Claw are designed such that, when in use, it turns into a finial. (Here are a lot of finials for comparison.)

son et lumière

I had planned not to follow anything about the actual concert today until full good-quality audio became available in the next couple days, but became so interested in witnessing the scene unfold on Twitter, along with discovering the several sources for live cell phone streaming video and pictures, that the sense of event pulled me in. I'm very glad now I followed it, and all I want to say at this point is that the obvious star of the show is the Claw.

Willie Williams has so much more than outdone himself... I mean, just stunning beauty that leaves you gasping. For me it brings to mind first the son et lumière shows one sees staged on summer nights with some of the great European cathedrals as their screens (sample video here), and second, Willie Williams' own previous works with churches or cathedrals as his canvas: e.g. the mirrorball at all Hallows, or his Easter Vigil installation at Canterbury Cathedral. Except now, there are none of the intrinsic limitations of trying to do light-art on an aging, unchangeable building. Willie has a cathedral designed to his own dimensions and specifications, and he can make it do tricks.

Of course you have no real sense of a show from bits on YouTube and cell phone videos -- but my reaction to what I've seen is that the band themselves came off as more completely in the role of servants to the overall process than ever before. Astounding. Is this rock 'n' roll?? (However, lest I sound too glowing, it's 2009 and you can't play "One"?)

marks and layers

Thought I would pull this out of the comments: Steve Taylor, whom I still look forward to meeting at the U2 Conference whenever it happens (kind of hoping we'll be in the same session since we're both giving papers focusing on U2's live work), offers some thoughts on the "Magnificent" video. While I agree that the connection of the visuals with the text is somewhat tenuous, we read the video a bit differently, as I think we do the song and the "the sound" concept, and maybe the album... but that's what makes it all fun.

Ah! bright wings

Some quick comments on the "Magnificent" video:
1. ...Another performance video?
2. Bono is just shameless, isn't he?
3. I'm immediately taken with the way everyone on camera seems endlessly to be trying to invite our gaze in the same direction I commented about in this post on the stagecraft in the Letterman performance of the song: up! UP!
4. The ecstatic desert dancers are a nice touch, out there dancing with/to the sun. I'm not sure members of the traditional Sufi orders wear red hoodies much, but I get the point.

And 5! Those white sheets; one thinks of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, but of course their wrapping encloses scenes in a more static mode, and this is all about dynamism. Struck by the way different aspects of the sheets communicate over the length of the video: we move from "there is more here than you know, and it's alive," to all different modes of revelation as the sheets come away (some of the moments are dramatic, eye-catching, others so shy and retiring they're missed by people right next to them, and in a couple the white fabric actually seems to be whisked away, playing hard-to-get as soon as we've glimpsed it), to the realization that the sheets themselves are as fascinating as the material stuff they were covering. As the video progresses, it's hard for me not to think of John 3:8 -- the sheets turn into a way to help us discern the movement of the wind, which is going on all the time, in constant interaction with the world we maybe initially thought they were obscuring but which, in fact, they are enlivening.

I'm especially moved by the scene where a crowd of people outside the Fez medina are absorbed in their own activities and remain completely uninterested as this gorgeous, living, visualized wind passes right over them. Twas ever thus.

And: how nice that we get to see the red-hoodied desert dancer arrive in town to meet all that blinding white dynamism in the air face to face.

Finally 6. It so makes me think of Gerard Manley Hopkins:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil...
...Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

In a comment on the "Get On Your Boots" post a few posts down, theologian Steve Harmon, author of U2: Unexpected Prophets, makes some points about the cover of No Line that I think deserve to be pulled out for everyone to see. I was completely delighted, for exactly the reasoning Harmon articulates so well here, that the Sugimoto image with no line (the photo rumored to be the album cover) turned out to be passed over for an image with a line:

The equals sign, with one bar in the "heaven" portion and one bar in the "earth" portion, suggests something like "your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." But in this particular Sugimoto image, there IS still a line on the horizon. Earth is not yet heaven, yet we pray and work for the day when things will fully be on earth as they are in heaven -- when heaven and earth will be indistinguishable, and there will be no line on the horizon. Once again, an "already"/"not yet" eschatology, with the emphasis on the "not yet."

I understood the attraction of the image of the sea blurring into the sky, because I know so much of U2's work is about the longing for and celebration of foretastes of that experience of transcendence. (One of the earliest articles I read about U2 in the 80s, which I have never been able to trace, characterized them with the phrase "blood lust for the infinite," which has always stuck with me.) But it struck me as lacking complete honesty for a U2 image to represent the blending of already/not yet as accomplished. Upon seeing the real cover, I immediately found the image we've ended up with far preferable, and more faithful to the band's consistently eschatologically-shaped vision of reality, and I'm grateful for Steve's putting the reasons why into words here.

Fear and Love

When Arcade Fire did their warmup concerts for the current tour, little tracts that simply read "DESIRE OR FEAR?" were left on the seats. This visual meditation on U2's "Yahweh" asks more or less the same question, with help from Scripture and artistic depictions of Jesus.