Rock biorhythms

At the Phoenix, James Parker on the new Metallica bio:

The most vivid and engaging passages of Enter Night, actually, are in this key of reminiscence: Wall bumping into Ulrich at the Hammersmith Odeon, the little drummer for some reason on crutches ("His outraged eyes studied mine. A precocious child growing rapidly into a full-on fuck of a man"); Mustaine emerging crackling from some toilet or drug tabernacle to be interviewed ("He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it"); Hammett chatting pleasantly about essential oils and then clamming up at the arrival of macho man Hetfield ("As we all walked into the bar together, I noticed Kirk affecting a sort of mini-Hetfield saunter. Safety in numbers, I found myself doing the same"). It makes one wish that Wall could have departed further from the conventions of rock biography — got more personal or more poetic/fragmentary, or written a book called My Life In Heavy Metal. Except that Steve Almond already wrote that book, and it had fuck-all to do with heavy metal.

One better than the devil

"Academics are hedgehogs and I am a fox": Deborah Ross interviews Malcolm Gladwell for the Independent.

Tom Cox plays a round of golf with Judas Priest axman K. K. Downing (FT site registration required).

At the Guardian Review, Nicholas Lezard on the latest installment of David Kynaston's history of Britain in the twentieth century (lots of good snippets there).

Arthur Danto's post at the NYT site the other day tipped me off to the existence of MOMA's Flickr photoset from Marina Abramović's recent show. Jason Grote points me to the fact that one immediately recognizable sitter is Lou Reed!