No, it’s not really named for the band (and as far as I know doesn’t play U2 songs exclusively along the trip), but there is a new subway line extension in Vienna that has been created to move the city more rapidly to the Ernst Happel football stadium.

If you’re a football fan who is interested in the upcoming championships, you’ll want to read more here.

If you’re like me (hoping to visit Vienna), you’ll want to ride that line someday just to get the ticket that surely reads “U2.”

In my opinion, these are some of the worst one-line lyrics in U2’s discography (in no order)

1) I’ll do the maximum time for you tonight (Love You Like Mad)
2) The air is heavy, heavy like a truck (Electrical Storm)
3) Grace, it’s the name for a girl (Grace)

What other one-line lyrics would you add to this list?

…you were able to book talent for your local college campus now using the prices of yesteryear! We sort of know that U2 rakes in a guaranteed amount of rediculous moohlah with any concert performance. Thinking back to the War tour, how cheap do you think it would have been for colleges to book U2 for their spring weekend concert? Exactly!

I was reminded of this as I was going through my basement (yes - I’m still going through my basement) and I stumbled upon a notebook from a college entertainment booking conference I attended in 1992. The showcase comedians for the conference were George Lopez, Dave Chappelle, and Jon Stewart. If you wanted to book, say, Jon Stewart - back then, it would have been a cool $1250. Dave Chappelle - $1000, and George Lopez was $1500 plus travel. Forget about getting them at that bargain basement price now!

To all of the college student event planners out there - remember you have the finger on the pulse of who’s who with up-and-coming acts. Enjoy the raw talent and pricing now because you won’t be able to afford them a few years from now.

April is National Poetry Month here in the U.S. Yeah, it’s still April for about 48 more hours. T. S. Eliot’s opening lines from “The Wasteland” are

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

That’s one main reason for why the fourth month of the year got picked. Shakespeare was born and died in April too, with both of those calender dates being within a week of each other.

I was enjoying some poetry the other day from Achtung Baby. Lately, I’ve been thinking this album showcases some of Bono’s finer poetic moments:

She wears my love like a see-through dress
Her lips say one thing
Her movements something else
Oh love like a screaming flower
Love dying every hour love

Or,

I dreamed that I saw Dali
With a supermarket trolley
He was tryin’ to throw his arms around a girl
He took an open-top beetle
Through the eye of a needle
He was tryin’ to throw his arms around the world

So, speaking of Shakespeare . . . what do you think are some of the better lines of poetry to have left Bono’s pen? Maybe a couplet comes to mind; or more? Maybe it rhymes, or it doesn’t?

And happy last hours of National Poetry Month!

Following on from Cara’s post about the Clarence, here’s the story of why Dublin is one of my favorite cities on the planet.

In 2001, my partner and I went to Dublin for a few days. We stayed at the Clarence, drank in the Octagon, and ate an enormous meal one night in the restaurant (where the sommelier learned we were from America and wanted to extol the virtues of a wine called Marilyn Merlot. I am not making this up.) We were celebrating our anniversary, and after a dinner with perhaps more wine than was strictly necessary, we went down the street to the Kitchen, U2’s nightclub.

We were both 40 at the time. Temple Bar was full of Beautiful Young People. The Kitchen had the usual red velvet rope guarded by large, hiply-dressed men. And I remember turning to my sweetie and saying, Oh, yeesh, what if they don’t let us in? I have been given the arched-eyebrow treatment by some of the gatekeepers of clubs in New York (who had to let me in because I was On The List, and it just about killed them because I totally skewed their demographic). I really didn’t want this to happen at the Kitchen.

So we approached the rope, and one Large Well-Dressed Man smiled and said, Ladies, are you coming in? And held the rope aside for us.

I love that man.

We went in and explored, and ended up at the far end of the club (through several rooms, across at least one dance floor). There was a bar in the back, and we found a table, and we had some Guinness, and talked… and before we knew it, it was about 3 AM and the place was heaving with people. They were literally standing packed like sardines around our table and others.

And my partner walks with a cane.

So, you can picture it — 40-year-old women, one using a cane, who have had a fair amount to drink and now have to make their way through about a million Young Dancing Drinking People without being trampled in the rush to claim our table.

And here’s what happened: We stood up. A man of about 21 or so said, Ladies, are you going out? And when we said yes, he proceeded to walk in front of us, politely tapping people on the shoulder and saying, Make way, please, make way. And everyone smiled and made way. We never even got jostled, never mind trampled. He walked us all the way to the entrance, and I was so amazed and grateful for the grace of the moment that I kissed him on the cheek and told him I’d never forget him. And I never have.

I’m glad I got to go to the Kitchen. But more than that, I’m glad I found out that Dublin is a city of such kind and lovely people.

I, too, am travelling this week in the UK - seems like a theme running through the @U2 staff. (Can someone say New York, London, Paris, Berlin…)

Since arriving in London, every time I channel surf, I seem to find a U2 reference. It’s like being in front of Bob’s Boxes in The Fly video with a remote control in a way Whilst channel surfing, I found that the Bono Biography was being broadcast on the UK Biography Channel (this is the programme that’s quite rubbish, by the way). A few channels later, I found that Q’s Music Television station has the top 20 U2 video countdown. Trouble is, those channels are blocked at the place I’m staying because my host hasn’t upgraded their cable television to have those channels. UGH! I’ll never know what Q feels is U2’s #1 video!

DAVE TV broadcasted Top of the Pops 2 a few days ago and they listed The Chimes’ version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” as the best U2 cover song released. The viewers of TOTP felt it was Johnny Cash’s version of “One.” DAVE TV has also been showing ads for the Friday with Jonathan Ross programme, and it’s featuring a quick cameo by U2 from a previous broadcast. The episode of Top Gear airing on that channel also features “Theme From Lets Go Native” and “United Colours” from the Passengers disc. Good golly!

I suppose I’ll need to start my U2 drinking game at the flat I’m staying at (drink every time a U2 reference appears on the screen) - as it’s St. Patrick’s Day, we’ll all be drunk in less than an hour with the rate I keep stumbling upon U2-related items on the tele.

While killing some time last night, I was looking at some comments about the “American Idol” results on EW.com and came across this one:

Before I go, I like to say I would absolutely love a U2 Week !!!

I know Bono made a brief appearance on “American Idol” last year for the charity episode, but a whole show using (and possibly abusing) U2’s music? I’m not sure if I could take that.

I don’t know how likely that scenario would be, but if the contestants were able to choose from the U2 songbook, what tunes would you want to hear? Or what songs would you hope and pray they leave alone? If Kristy Lee Cook turned “In a Little While” into a country hoe-down, I might just cry. And not in a good way.

Got an e-mail from Red Floor Records a few days ago (you probably did too, if you bought the $9.99 album download of Daniel Lanois’ Here Is What Is).  Now they are selling “Goldtop” packages for $50 more that have the album, the film, and lots more.  Hurry, only 3000 available!

I don’t know …  it IS a sweet deluxe package and all, with the goodies you’d expect.  No, Lanois won’t be hand-delivering it himself, and no, it does not come with any actual gold.  But what really caught my eye was the deluxe DVD has an hour of extra footage that boasts “alternative versions of songs from the film.”  And you get photographs, a Moleskine notebook and a “classic little rock and roll button.” (Eh?)

Well, OK: the extra footage is sure to have more of U2 jamming away in Fez with Eno and Lanois, right?  And I’d love to watch even more of Lanois making his transcendent music at the pedal steel.  The retail price of all that’s included might indeed approach $50, but sheesh, this fan has got to stick to a budget.

Would you buy this?  How much is too much to ask for the deluxe versions of what we love?

If you’re a fan of the Irish band The Frames (like me), or loved the recent film Once (like me), chances are you were ecstatic last night when the song “Falling Slowly” took home an Oscar.

What you might not know is that Glen Hansard, the male lead and co-writer of the song, received a special text message from our favorite front-man before the ceremony.

Read the full story here.

It really is great when nice guys finish first.

I paid for and downloaded Daniel Lanois’ mp3 soundtrack for his film Here is What Is about two weeks ago, and it’s been on heavy rotation. At work, I’ve just played it over and over, probably twice a day on average.   Track 5 is a spoken track: it’s what Brian Eno has to say to Lanois about Beauty and the composing process. After so many listenings, this track had seeped into my conscience such that when I was trying to think of a way to encourage my writing students in Advanced Composition class that they shouldn’t despair if it takes writing 2, 3 or 6 drafts of junk in order to start seeing the beginnings of something better, the first thing that came to mind was to quote Eno: “beautiful things grow out of sh**.” 

Here’s what he was telling Lanois:

“Well, I’ll tell you, one thing I would say about your film is that, what would be really interesting for people to see is how beautiful things grow out of sh**.  Because, nobody ever believes that.  You know, everyone thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head.  They somehow appeared there and formed in his head and all he had to do was write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world.  

But I think that what’s so interesting and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come out of nothing.  Things evolve out of nothing.   You know, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest.  And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing.  I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that’s how things work. “

And it was what Eno said at the end of his mini-soliloquy that I really wanted them to hear:

“If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted, they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of normal person, you could never do anything like that — then you live a different kind of life.  You could have another kind of life where you could say, ‘Well, I know that things come from nothing very much, and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something …‘ “

So I played track 5 for them in class and encouraged them to just start writing something – anything – even if it feels like an unpromising beginning.  Then let the power of revision  make that “right situation” for the seed to grow and begin its transformation into something beautiful.

Sounds sort of like something a friend of Lanois and Eno’s said a few years back, eh?.