The out of print Fritz Leiber

Attention publishers: If you’re going to print Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, either bite the bullet and publish the stories in a giant honking omnibus edition or publish all of the collections back to back to back.

It seems like every time someone gets around to republishing these amazing stories, they run out of money halfway through, meaning used book stores are clogged with versions of the first few books, but you can’t find the final stories for love or money.

And, of course, the fact that you can find so many copies of the first books means that reprints of them don’t sell, meaning that money isn’t forthcoming for the later editions … it’s a vicious circle of suckitude.

This is just a grim sight to see when looking for Leiber books, in the naive hope of finding the later books for sale.

Nouvelle Vague

Although I enjoy funny or tongue-in-cheek songs, I always feel a little silly about enjoying outright novelty songs. Why, I’m not sure; surely I’m entitled to listen to any sort of music I enjoy. But the fact remains, if a song has, as its primary virtue, a video with the lead singer dressed up as an obese version of Michael Jackson, I’m inclined to give it a pass.

But other than Green Jelly’s “Three Little Pigs,” I haven’t enjoyed a novelty song for a very long time. So it’s with a bit of befuddlement that I find myself enjoying songs by Nouvelle Vague, a French band that covers punk and New Wave music. (You can listen to them on the amazingly amazing Morning Becomes Eclectic here.)

I’m not sure what it is about hearing them cover the Dead Kennedys’ “Too Drunk to Fuck” as a breezy bossa nova tune that makes me grin ear to ear — although shifting the song from a male singer to a female one subtly changes the lyrics, in my mind — but it does. Even better than that, though, is their reinterpretation of a classic for those who graduated high school in the 1980s: “Melt with You” by Modern English. This stripped-down performance is a real reinterpretation of the hyper-earnest original. So not only is it funny for people my age (eek, I have a “my age” now), it actually makes you appreciate the song itself, as though listening to it again for the first time.

My musical tastes have been undergoing something of a transformation in the last year or two. French people singing ’80s New Wave as a bossa nova tune isn’t somewhere I expected to end up, which just goes to show, I suppose.

Maybe they’re not novelty tunes at all. In which case, ignore this post and just go download “Melt with You” from iTunes.

Death by Cherry Coke

According to this site, it would take the caffeine 441 2/3 cans of Cherry Coke to kill me.

Now I know to stop with 440 cans at a sitting.

(Source.)

Liz Phair on Wisteria Lane

Liz Phair will be covering the Rolling Stones’ “Mother Little Helper” on the Desperate Housewives album, hitting stores on September 20. It’s got a pretty amazing line-up of female artists, although given the number of “TBA” tunes at this hour, it’s pretty clear that this is only a soundtrack in the loosest of senses.

Hank Stuever’s last in-house Washington Post critique

America’s only pink paper (no, seriously), the New York Observer had this bit on Washington Post Style section reporter Hank Stuever going a wee bit further during his turn in the daily-critique-by-a-staffer thing than the big brass may have intended:

This forum seems to have a lot of focus-group fallout, calling for: shorter stories, faster formats, oh my it’s all too much to handle, I can’t possibly read it all, I don’t know where to start, I get everything I need from my (pet electronic doodad). And, my favorite, from a critique a couple of days ago, the assistant news editor guy who reads the NYT, WSJ (so navigable! Huh?), then gets online and reads everything else, and then and only then might deign to read The Post, which is, again, too this and too that and is an incredible intrusion on his time. Remarkably, the paychecks navigate their way to his bank account every other Friday, which is another way for me to say that I firmly, firmly believe that if you can be bothered to work here, you can bother to read this paper – the meatspace version, not the Web, the printed result that we all worked so hard to make — every day before you read someone else’s. This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding whether or not there’s something worth stopping on.

I think we’ve overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn’t include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: “News Flash: Everything’s Not Always About You.”

OK, that’s probably all funnier to me than it is to some of you, but I’m laughing here. And, frankly, Stuever nails a lot of the stuff that’s wrong with the reader survey results and (to an even greater extent) what the newspaper consultants have been pushing recently.

(Source.)