Time returns to its normal shape/ going to the world cup/ an outpouring of gaelic emotion and beer/ edge passes up a chance to meet the girl of his dreams/ Italian restaurants and Irish bars

it's my birthday," Paul McGuinness says in June in the swanky bar of a Manhattan hotel. Everyone raises their glasses to toast him. "I'm forty-three." I point out to Edge that it was a year ago that U2 played at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin and we toasted Paul's birthday on the plane back to Dublin. It was two years ago this week that U2 landed at Sellafield, three years since Achtung Baby came together in Dublin. Edge's jaw drops another notch with each anniversary I tick off. Time was elastic during the Zoo tour. During the two years on the road time stretched, snapped, shrank, and stretched again as U2 flew outside the calendar. In the six months since the tour ended in Japan, time has returned to its usual pace. Tom Freston is here. He and McGuinness are continuing develop­ment of the Zoo TV network. The idea is becoming simpler—a hip movie channel with a few home shopping bells and whistles. Freston figures that it will be the nineties TV equivalent of all those campus repertory cinemas that showed King of Hearts, The Harder They Come, and Harold and Maude every weekend in the 1970s; it will be alternative television. Freston is exhausted—he has spent the last year on airplanes, overseeing MTV's international expansion. He has been to China three times recently. The Chinese government got so annoyed at the subver­sive programming being beamed in from Hong Kong that they outlawed satellite dishes and sent troops to smash up any they could find. Freston has been meeting with the communists about replacing the outlawed MTV Asia with a nice state-controlled MTV of their own. ("We have

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no human rights policy at MTV," he joked. "If they want to make videos using slave labor, that's fine with us.")

The Zoo TV discussions are only an excuse for McGuinness, his eight-year-old son, Max, and half the Principles to be in New York. The real occasion is the World Cup soccer match between Ireland and Italy at Giants Stadium on Saturday. It is the first time the football championships have been played in the United States and the sheer existential perfection of those two icons of ethnicity facing off within shouting distance of Ellis Island has made this match the hottest of World Cup tickets. Ireland, which has never won a game in World Cup competition, is not given much of a chance against Roberto Baggio and his mighty azzurri—but, as every Hibernian flying into New York this weekend will tell you, the Irish team recently handed the Germans an unprecedented defeat in their home stadium, and they upset the Swiss in pre-Cup play. A tie with Italy would be considered a victory, and would allow the Irish to move ahead with fists aloft and off-key singing.

New York is suffering under a railroad strike and a week-long 95-degree heat wave, made worse by oppressive humidity and thick haze. There is some sad muttering that this weather will be too much for the poor Irish team. Americans are hanging by their TVs following the bizarre case of O. J. Simpson, the legendary gridiron hero who is being pursued by police for the grisly murder of his ex-wife and a male friend. But the city is aswamp with green jerseys and Dublin accents, all of whom have only one kind of football in mind.

Edge is among them. He called me to say he was in town and was staying at Adam's place. "Adam's pad!" I said. "Boy, there must be glamorous women calling there twenty-four hours a day! Gina Lollobrigida! Raquel Welch!"

"Yeah!" said Edge. "I can't wait to get off the phone to see which of them calls next!" We meet for dinner that night with Ned ("Call Me Rosencrantz") O'Hanlon, in for the game from Dublin, and Suzanne Doyle, in from London where she has been living since going to work for MTV Europe. Over dinner there flows a lot of nostalgia, exaggera­tions, and shocked expressions as people fill each other in about who on the tour was having affairs with whom. There are also toasts made to Ned whose Dreamchaser has produced two of the six documentaries shortlisted from a couple of hundred submissions for the upcoming International Monitor Awards in Washington, D.C. The two

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Dreamchaser nominees are Bill Carter's "Miss Sarajevo" and "Black Wind, White Land," Ali Hewson's Chernobyl documentary.

All through the meal, and afterward as we visit a couple of clubs, New Yorkers recognize Edge and send him drinks, ask for autographs, shake his hand, and tell him they are rooting for Ireland in the World Cup. Morleigh has gone off to direct a dance project overseas, so Edge is on his own. He says he's been enjoying his first real break in the fifteen years since U2 started on the road. He's been traveling a lot and working with Philips on an interactive computer "magazine."

I think Edge is onto something there; it seems that the Internet and other computer bulletin boards have taken on the air of mystery, of being part of a secret world, which rock & roll used to have when it was hard to find, when a kid had to lie in bed and fiddle with the radio dial to pull in some crazy music that he'd never heard before. I never thought I'd say this, but there is more of a sense of community in the computer world, in cyberspace, these days than there is in rock & roll. One of the amazing properties such secret communities have is the ability to imbue even the hardware they use with a piece of that mystery. Jimi Hendrix made the Stratocaster an object of beauty and magic for one generation of kids. Who's to say that someone won't make a computer look the same way to the next?

Edge, though, only wants to hear about a controversy that made a small blip in the American media last week, before being overwhelmed by the 0. J. Simpson story. The television talk show host Phil Donahue made an agreement with a condemned man to broadcast the man's execution on his TV program. Conservatives successfully opposed the measure, on the grounds that if the American public saw executions on TV they might turn against capital punishment. (Fat chance! They'd probably demand boiling in oil and Drawing and Quartering with the Rich and Famous.') The debate ended when the potential guest star was executed. Off-camera. Edge finds this latest development in ratings-grabbing an astonishment. He wants to know if the whole culture has gone media mad.

I tell him that I recently took a friend's advice and rented Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 satirical film Network. My pal was right—it's all come true. Network predicted a culture in which the race for ratings would turn Americans into a swarm of demagogue-following, reality-program-ad­dicted, violence-watching video junkies. At the end of the movie the

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hero, an old television newsman being put out to pasture, makes a speech to his Infotainment-happy successor that could have been printed on the Zoo TV screens:

"You're television incarnate, Diana—indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common ruhble of banality. War, murder, death is trie same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds, instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Everything you touch dies with you,"

At the climax of the movie a televised assassination (paid for by the network) is run on one TV screen next to other screens filled with ads for cereal, soda pop, and the friendly skies. Edge says he doesn't know the movie. I tell him he's lived it. At the bar across the restaurant patrons are watching live helicopter transmissions of O. J. Simpson's car fleeing from the L.A. police.

The next day Ossie Kilkenny stands like Santa Claus in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, handing out tickets to a Giants Stadium skybox and directing about forty friends and freeloaders into waiting cars and vans. Larry Mullen and Joe O'Herlihy want no part of such nonsense; they go off to sit by themselves close to the soccer field and watch Ireland battle Italy unimpeded by social interactivity.

Given the oppressive heat, even the skybox is pretty humid, but there is an appropriate corned beef and lasagna buffet and great emotion for the Gaelic/Garlic contest. As soon as the match begins one guest starts screeching, "Come on, ye boys in green!" at the top of her lungs and does not stop even as those around her recoil, pop aspirin, and plug their ears.

To an American the greatest thing about soccer is that it is played without time-outs or breaks. No commercials' Just two forty-five-minute halves, which in this heat demands superhuman stamina. Early in the game Irish midfielder Ray Houghton makes a long cross into the mid­dle of the Italian defense. He intercepts a Marco Baresi header near the penalty area, swerves, and bangs a left-footed shot over the head of startled Italian goalkeeper Gianluca Pagliuca to score for Ireland.

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