Now this is just funny.

Today's New York Times Magazine gives us a birds-eye of an interesting project. Turns out Metallica has been filming their group therapy sessions. [I know, the link requires a login, suck it up]

Not only that, but the reviewer gleefully indulges in the exact thing you or I would in the theater: mockery. Just listen:

Virtually everyone in the theater snickered like condescending hyenas, just as they did during every other visceral, meaningful moment in the documentary. And so did I.

Yeah, that sounds about right. I actually saw Metallica about a year ago, and it was the first time [God knows how it took me this long] to utter in public, "I just don't get white people." There were great heaving women who yanked up their tops and licked each other to audience hootings. The venue [some big roofed thing in Houston] stopped selling beer a full hour before Metallica even came on, suggesting to me that this was their only attempt at crowd control. And then the band came out.

My friend Ray was a bouncer in the Bay Area throughout the 80s, and he got a weirdly intimate look at that world. Humpty from the Digital Underground was a regular, and Ray observed lots of madness and busted heads. His name for Metallica is "The Glitter Midgets", which, having seen them in concert, is completely accurate.

How to tell? The stage is covered in stagehands and cameramen and light dudes scurrying this way and that. A cameraman goes up to James Hetfield or Lars and shoots for awhile, and you can't help but think, "Shit, that's a big cameraman." He's got at least a head on James, maybe a head an a half. "Fuck, that one over there by Lars is huge too! Fuck, they're all gi-normous!"

This is in fact actually not true. All the cameramen at a Metallica show look like giants because the band itself is probably 5'5". We're talkin James Madison small. Many celebrities are, turns out. I've met Lenny Kravitz, who can't be any more than 5'7", probably less. In "Zoolander", you can see clearly that Ben Stiller is even shorter than that. Tom Cruise, Van Damme, Stallone .. quite a pattern. I am shocked, shocked that persons who might have felt inferior in some way have sought out careers that commanded the adulation of millions. It's astonishing!