U2's grandiose display: Seeing is believing

Much has been said about elaborate, mind-boggling set design for U2’s”360 Tour,” which stopped in Charlottesville Thursday during its journey across some of the biggest and most cherished cities in the world.

But neither hearsay nor pictures really do the set — the multimillion price of which amounts to more than the gross domestic product of some countries—justice. It’s one of those things you just have to see to believe.

And even then you couldn’t exactly tell what you were looking at. Was the enormous tentacle-looking structure supposed to make us think of aliens? Spaceships? Insects? Perhaps the sculpture’s symbolism was best left up to interpretation, but it did function, housing a spectacular screen with millions of pixels that continually did nothing less that stupefy viewers.

What was interesting though, as we watched Bono and crew belt out cherished songs, was that the mammoth piece eventually seemed to become more about each of our tiny places in a big universe—a unifying statement of fragility and our need for codependence.

“How do you like our space junk?” Bono, now nearly as famous for his humanitarian work as his songs, said. “We really built it to be closer to you.”