Irish Invasion

U2

Snow Patrol

You’d be forgiven if you thought it was St. Patrick’s as two Irish bands landed in NYC this past week: U2 played Giants Stadium on September 23 and 24; Snow Patrol played the Beacon Theatre September 22 and 23.

U2 needs no introduction – they’ve been around a long time, since 1976 to be precise when they formed the band under the name Feedback. The first U2 song I ever heard was the live version of Sunday Bloody Sunday, and it just blew me away – it was passionate, desperate, visceral. It was love at first sound. At the time, no company distributed them in Brazil, and I could only get their records (yes…it was that long ago, when CDs weren’t even commercialized) in one of only 2 stores in Rio that sold imported records. I thought at the time that I’d probably never ever have the chance to see them live.

And there I was last Thursday at Giants Stadium for my 6th U2 concert remembering all this. I have to be honest, though: I didn’t care for their latest album “No Line On The Horizon”. It sounds like they wanted to take their music in a new direction but didn’t quite get there so the album feels vague at best. I can even say that U2 haven’t written any song that blew me away in the past decade or so, but their success is undeniable: on Thursday, U2 broke the Giants Stadium attendance record, bringing in 84,472 fans (the previous record was held by Pope John Paul II with 82,948 people in 1995). It sure felt like a crowd: it took me over one hour to get from the NJ Turnpike exit to the parking lot, a distance of less than 2 miles (~3.2 km)!

This is their 360° Tour, so called because the stage set-up allows viewing from any angle. The stage was nicknamed The Claw by the band and crew, and to me, it looked like a giant alien insect when I first laid eyes on it. It’s a gigantic production: the stage is 164 ft (50m) tall and requires 120 trucks to transport. The video screen is circular, made up of over 1 million pieces that allow it to move up and down and also spread apart vertically so it becomes more than just a screen – it’s a crucial part of the visual effects. It’s hard to explain in words how the screen works, but you’ll understand when you see the photos.

But as impressive and innovative as the setup was, for me the best moment of the show had nothing to do with the production: it was during “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” when the audience started singing along. And those tens of thousands of voices singing in unison just sent chills down my spine.

Snow Patrol was the other Irish band of the week, although they’re no longer totally Irish since the lineup now includes 2 Scotsmen. Snow Patrol started life as Shrug in 1994 but only became popular in the US in May 2006 when “Chasing Cars” was played in the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy”. I first saw them on a freezing night in late March 2006 at the Bowery Ballroom, a minuscule venue for 550 people in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The venue is so small that when you stand on the first row, you can actually rest your arms on the stage. I got there 20 minutes before the start of the show thinking I’d end up in the back of the venue, but somehow I managed to squeeze my way to the second row and to this day I want to kill myself for not taking my camera…

This time, I caught them at the Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side, a 2,800-seat venue. The great thing about a small place is that you can really see the musicians, how they interact with the audience and with each other. And Snow Patrol is a fun act to watch: they create a great rapport with the audience, and their songs are contagious without being clichéd, with strong melodies that have earned them the admiration of musicians as diverse as Bono of U2, Michael Stipe of REM and Nikki Sixx of Mötley Crüe (!?…go figure this one out…). Plus, there’s Gary Lightbody, the most charming frontman I’ve ever seen in a rock band. He’s witty, he’s funny, and has one of the 3 most beautiful voices I’ve heard in the past 5 years (the others are Tom Chaplin of Keane, the most accomplished singer of the three, and Paul Banks of Interpol, the least accomplished of the three, but who has a powerful baritone voice that can stop you in your tracks). When Lightbody starts to sing, I melt like a chocolate bar in the summer sun…

For me, the highlight of their show was something totally unexpected. There’s a song I love from their latest album “A Hundred Million Suns”, but the song is 16+ minutes long and every time I listened to it, I lamented that I’d never listen to it live because no band would ever play a song that long on a live show. They did, and I was on cloud 9. Snow Patrol are entertaining, surprising, they can make you sing and can make you laugh. And sometimes that is just priceless.

Who's Afraid Of Social Democracy?

Sweden

Some trips are planned, others are accidental. For Labor Day, my choices were the Northwest U.S. or the Caribbean. I soon discarded the Caribbean – with the hurricane season, bad weather was a real threat. And traveling to the Northwest wasn’t cheap around the holiday. Then I started looking at European cities with direct flights from the U.S., more out of curiosity than anything else. I found one with airfares costing merely $70 above tickets for the Northwest – and that’s how I ended up in Stockholm, Sweden.

Sweden is slightly bigger than California, and its population of 9.2 million is about ¼ that of the Golden State. Many associate Sweden with Abba, Ikea, or Nobel Prizes, but having been there before, I always viewed the country as one of the most advanced societies on earth and its rankings confirm that - Sweden is first in the world in the latest Economist’s Democracy Index, third in Gender Equality and seventh in the UN’s Human Development Index. Not bad for a place filled with Barbarians some centuries ago.

Sweden is a social democracy, with many ideas borrowed from socialism (and I can hear some people gasping at the S-word). It has one of the world’s highest tax burdens with a tax-to-GDP ratio of 48% (the U.S. is ~28%), and taxes fund one of the most generous welfare systems in the world, with virtually free schools, child care, health care, pensions, and elder care. And as the debate about U.S. health care reform rages on, I couldn’t help but research how things work over there.

In Sweden, health care costs 9% of GDP (vs. 16% in the U.S.), funded mostly by taxes (70%), with only 3% coming from patient fees – patients pay only SEK 80 (~$11.50) per day for hospital stays, and no more than SEK 1,800 (~$260) in consultations and medications per 12-month period. The health care system is decentralized, with counties responsible for providing services – each county owns all emergency hospitals while about 25% of health centers are outsourced to privately run companies. Sweden ranks 10th in the world in life expectancy, and even though U.S. health care spending is almost double the percent of GDP than Sweden's, the U.S. ranks 50th, 7 spots behind Bosnia Herzegovina (don’t jeer, Brazilian friends, because Brazil ranks behind Gaza!)

Swedes are doing something right, but nothing is perfect: a major complaint is the long waiting time for non-emergency treatment. So the government came up with a rule to minimize that: if the waiting time exceeds three months, the patient is offered care in a county other than their own, with all costs paid for by their own county, including travel. The Swedish health system sounds so good that I wish I’d sprained an ankle just to experience first hand this “socialist” system…

Sweden has a long seafaring history, and perhaps this is more evident in the capital Stockholm, known as “Venice of the North” and spread over 14 islands connected by over 50 bridges. About 30% of the city area is made up of waterways, with another 30% covered by green spaces, making it one of the greenest cities in Europe. In fact, earlier this year, Stockholm won the first European Green Capital title awarded by the European Commission, and it aims to be “fossil fuel free” by 2050.

The heart of Stockholm is Gamla Stan (Old Town), the city’s oldest section founded in the 13th century. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, the area was a slum, but in the 1980s, people started to value the maze of cobbled streets lined with medieval buildings, and the island is now one of city’s main attractions. For the best of Gamla Stan, don’t just stick to Västerlånggatan, the very commercial main thoroughfare. Take any side street and roam aimlessly, not worrying about getting lost – Gamla Stan is so small that you’ll always end up by the water.

For boat fiends, two places are a must. One are the docks on the eastern side of the small island of Skeppsholmen, with still functioning old vessels, some built in the 19th century, some made entirely of oak. It looks more like an impromptu museum than a pier. The other is the Vasa Museum on the island of Djurgården. Vasa was a 64-gun warship, the first of its kind built in Sweden, designed to be the mightiest in the world at the time – measuring 230 ft (69 m) in length and 172 ft (52.5 m) in height, and decorated with numerous statues, Vasa was to be a symbol of Sweden’s wealth and power. The ship is majestic and I can only imagine the excitement surrounding its maiden voyage in 1628: hundreds at port watching Vasa set sail, proud as they could ever be of such an imposing vessel. After Vasa traveled about a nautical mile…it capsized and sank, and in this case, there wasn’t even an iceberg to blame. The ship slumbered in the bay for 333 years until it was finally recovered in 1961.

On the same island as Vasa is Skansen, the world’s first open-air museum with a collection of traditional Swedish houses and shops brought from different parts of the country. Staff in period costumes recreate life in centuries past and demonstrate weaving, glass-blowing, and blacksmithing among other crafts. Skansen is entertaining for both adults and children, and with 75 acres, you can easily spend a day there.

Sweden is a monarchy and you can actually visit sections of the palace where the royal family lives in Drottningholm (there is another palace in Gamla Stan, used only for state functions). On the day we went, there was an official reception but the palace remained open for visitation and around 3 pm, King, Queen and guests came outside for official photos, and I managed to take a few pictures. So from now on, every time I speak of this episode I’ll say that I’ve encountered Swedish royalty on palatial grounds and have had the pleasure of sharing the gardens with them.

If Stockholmers are any indication, Swedes are unassuming, extremely polite people with a very high level of education (everyone we met spoke English) and apparently healthy (about 85% of the population are non-smokers and less than 10% are obese). And for Americans fearing that the healthcare public option may lead to socialism, Sweden and other developed countries prove that market economies can provide quality universal healthcare for their citizens. It’s mainly a question of putting people before private profits.