2,160: The number of wheels on which the 2009 U2 360 tour is currently rolling across this great nation. Divided by 18, that’s 120 trucks, carrying only the lights and stage for the tour. Who knows how many tour buses it takes to cart around Bono’s Prada support team.

7,400: A rough, and conservative, estimate of the number of miles the North American portion of the tour will have traveled when it stops in Vancouver on October 28.

126,857: At an average of 7 miles per gallon, this is the number of gallons of diesel U2 will have sucked down by the end of the month just to transport its stage from venue to venue. This isn’t even counting the 24 European dates earlier this summer, which I had to leave out of this calculation because the whole metric conversion thing just made me even angrier. NASA can’t even figure that shit out.

0: The number of times the New York Times editorial board should let Bono, that smug Irish twat, even mention, without an asterisk*, the fact that severe climate change, along with extremist ideology and extreme poverty, is one of the three biggest threats this planet faces right now.

*Carbon offsets be damned. The damage is done, dude.

Photo by Brandon Wu

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an article about Jim O’Rourke, an underground overachiever who, in addition to recording his own solo music, has played in Sonic Youth and Gastr Del Sol, and worked in various other capacities with Wilco, Joanna Newsom, and Superchunk.

His latest project is the new solo album The Visitor, a recording that, at times, features as many as 200 tracks of instruments.

As one might imagine, an album such as this would require quite an intricate mix, which is perhaps why The Visitor will only be available on CD and vinyl—no digital download.

Read More “Has the Pushback Begun?” »

That’s right—the other Dave McKenna.

For years, whether in print or on the web, adoring City Paper readers have hearkened to the mellifluous prose of D.C.’s Dave McKenna—his rhapsodic treatment of Pop Warner football, his scherzo-like political musings, his epic riffs on the Dan Synder perplex.

Turns out he’s not the only D. Mac around.

On Saturday, jazz geeks learned that Dave McKenna, the great Massachusetts ballad-boogie pianist, had died of lung cancer at the age of 78. In its obit, the New York Times included a nice encomium on his instrumental approach:

That style, rooted in the jazz piano tradition of an earlier era, was built around powerful bass lines, elegantly voiced chords and a loving approach to melodies, especially those of the Tin Pan Alley standards that were the foundation of his vast repertory. He liked to spin out long medleys united by a theme, like famous and obscure songs with “You,” “Stars” or “Spring” in the title.

“I don’t know if I qualify as a bona fide jazz guy,” he once said. “I play saloon piano. I like to stay close to the melody.”

See for yourself in the video below (”Serenade in Blue”). Touching stuff, but not exactly the musical equivalent of eviscerating Lou Dobbs.