Restaurant coffee in the 1960's tasted like swill - by David Martin

What was on the mind of the writers and editors of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1963? The shitty coffee being served in the city's restaurants.

Chronicle culture writer Peter Hartlaub today marked the 50th anniversary of the paper's war on dismal coffee. The three-part (!) series featured the magical headline "A Great City's People Forced to Drink Swill."

Sample passage:

San Francisco restaurants buy more than three million pounds of coffee every year from processors who profess to instruct them meticulously in its proper preparation.

Yet for all the money the restaurants spend, and for all the effort the coffee companies put forth to make their product palatable, most of it tastes as though it came from some vast common reservoir up behind Twin Peaks in which it had been brewed by the three scrofulous witches in Macbeth.

Now that's public journalism!

Hartlaub's story reminded me of a passage from David Owen's profile of George Meyer, one of the driving forces behind The Simpsons. In the piece, Owen explains that Meyer was hired to work on show largely on the strength of a small humor magazine he published called Army Man.

Despite its modest appearance, Army Man attracted a surprisingly broad and loyal following. It made Rolling Stone's Hot List in 1989, and for years it circulated in samizdat on college campuses. "The only rule was that the stuff had to be funny and pretty short," Meyer told me. "To me, the quintessential Army Man joke was one of John Swartzwelder's: 'They can kill the Kennedys. Why can't they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?' It's a horrifying idea juxtaposed with something really banal — and yet there's a kind of logic to it. It's illuminating because it's kind of how Americans see things: Life's a big jumble, but somehow it leads to something I can consume. I love that."

By the way, the guy who took the pictures for the Chronicle's series on coffee is the same guy who took the picture of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima.

Loving a Band That's Easy to Hate: My Life with KISS - David Martin

This is Day 2 of Kiss Kountdown. Click here for Day 3

Loving a Band That's Easy to Hate: My Life with KISS - David Martin

I was eight years old when Kiss' popularity peaked. I owned a copy of Alive! and a Destroyer jigsaw puzzle. I was not a dues-paying member of the Kiss Army. But I was at least in the Kiss Reserves.

Then, Kiss became like a toy that no longer interested me.

I don’t remember being upset when Peter Criss and Ace Frehley left. My friend Steve, who lived across the street and had cable TV at his house, called me when the video for “Thriller” aired on MTV. There had been no phone call when, a few months earlier, the members of Kiss appeared on the network without makeup.

I became a Kiss fan again in high school. Colin and other friends argued on behalf of the band’s legitimacy in the lunchroom. Also, we were driving by this point. Waiting out the tense period after puberty but before girls found us appealing, we did not have many places to go besides record stores and concerts.

My first Kiss show was in the spring of 1986. Kiss visited Columbus at the tail end of the Asylum tour. Hair metal was going through its neon colors-and-rouge phase. Gene Simmons — the demon! — was not a man for these sequined times. He looks ridiculous on stage in pictures from that era. But I don't recall thinking the show was ridiculous. I remember having a great time.

I continued to attend Kiss shows past the point where I could blame a not fully developed brain. Sometimes I have paid for shows, and sometimes I have had press credentials. I have seen the band with and without makeup and the original four members. Shows have ended with me feeling cheated and shows have ended with me feeling elated.

The last time I saw the band, in 2009, I accompanied the music critic at the newspaper where I worked. Our seats were in the second row, right in front of Gene’s microphone stand. It was the first and only time I have had great seats at an arena show. During one break between songs, I spied Gene using a water bottle to wash the blood off the ends of his hair. 

I am not a stupid man, and I like to think I have pretty good taste. Bands I really dislike — Poison, Def Leppard — are not too dissimilar from Kiss. On paper, at least, I should have grown out of Kiss a second time. But I did not. In fact, not too long ago, I took the time to burn a CD of my favorite Gene songs. 

Therein, I think, lies the simple answer to the riddle of why I still like Kiss: The band has a lot of good songs.

This, for instance is Gene's B-material:

Kiss performed "Almost Human" in concert for the first time on a recent, nerds-only Kiss cruise. Yep, even on the night when Paul Stanley went to the hospital and the band performed without him, this gem stayed in the bag. That's how many good songs Kiss has.

​Think Kiss is all mediocre head-banging bullshit? Cuddle up to this fire. It will keep you warm:

Gene, of course, is not the only songwriter in the band. In his review of Rock and Roll Over, the respected critic Robert Christgau praised the band for its "tough, catchy songs." I like think that Christgau was thinking of Paul Stanley's contributions when he wrote that passage. Take a look at what Paul brought to RARO:

"I Want You"
"Take Me" (co-written with Sean Delaney)
"Mr. Speed" (co-written with Delaney)
"Hard Luck Woman"
"Makin' Love" (Delaney again)

Eight moths later, the band released Love Gun. "I Stole Your Love" and "Love Gun" (Paul songs) opened each side. The solo albums came next, and Colin's right that Paul's is the best of the bunch. Starchild was on fire. 

The band's Lennon/McCartney dynamic is a big reason why the band has endured. No, I am not arguing Kiss was as good as and important as the Beatles. But bands with two principals have a lot of advantages: more songs, a less fertile environment for self-indulgence. When one crew chief hits in a dry spell or becomes disinterested (see: Gene, 1982–1991), the other one can put the band on his back. (Paul wore bike reflectors on his.) 

Having two male leads has obviously meant a lot to Kiss' live shows. When you begin to tire of Paul's ass-shaking, finger-linking and chest-hair caressing, you can watch a seven-foot bat clomp around, breathe fire and leer at your date. 

Sure, sure, there's a lot not to like about Kiss. The relentless and crass merchandising. How obnoxious Gene is. The lyrics. (Not content to write a song called "Love Gun," Paul would later reference said gun in song called "Bang, Bang You.") Hipsters collect and swap Paul's ridiculous stage banter in the same way that hipsters of yore used to swap videotapes of Jerry Lewis being maudlin on his telethon. 

I cannot defend Kiss Kaskets or Gene's interview with Terry Gross. But if I knew something about your tastes, I could probably burn a CD of Kiss songs that you would like (or at least not hate). If I took you to a show, you would think it is dumb in a pro wrestling kind of way. But your head would bob when the band played "Love Gun" and you might think Gene's boots are also kind of cool, too.

"A million so-and-so's can't be wrong" is usually a bad argument. But if the Grateful Dead gets to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, so does Kiss. The fist pumps and hippie dances have spoken. 

So here's a toast (or as Paul might say, a little al-ka-HOL!!!) to the band famous enough to appear on jigsaw puzzles, greedy enough to remain a going concern several years after a "farewell" tour, and tough and catchy enough to keep us interested. 

David Martin

Summer In The City reprint series, part one: A Somewhat Organized List of 1980's Comedies - by David Martin

Like most of Continental Europe - which does not have the benefit of central air conditioning -  the Pencilstorm offices largely close down during the dog days of August.  It was especially bad this year, since Ricki C. took home the Koolerator box fan he brought in from a West Side yard sale and Colin "borrowed" the Kenmore window A/C unit he scored at a St. Agatha's swap meet "temporarily" for his second bedroom and never brought it back. 

As such, for the next week or ten days, Pencilstorm will be running a reprint series of our favorite blogs from our regular writers and some of the ringers we've solicited pieces from over the past three years.  This is part one:  

A Somewhat Organized List of 1980's Comedies - by David Martin  

New York magazine did an interview with Steven Soderbergh that's worth reading. Among other things, the director talks about avoiding disaster film clichés ("Can’t show the president. No helicopter shots"), the gentle spirit of the Ocean's franchise, and the darkness of Saturday Night Fever.

Soderbergh's a good dude, and he makes good movies. But he said one thing I disagree with: He called the 1980s a "terrible decade" for American films.

Hmmm... Raging Bull, Blade Runner, E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Vietnam movies, Aliens and Amadeus—those are some pretty good mainstream movies. Die Hard is arguably the best action movie ever. If you can look past the shoe-sized cell phones and dated eyewear, Wall Street holds up really well.

Comedies, it seems, were especially strong. Now, I was teenager for most of the '80s, and I'm sure that colors my thinking. But if nothing else, comedies of the '80s were more varied than they are today, when everything is basically a variation of Old School (and, to a lesser extent, Office Space). Here's a list of movies I found entertaining and maybe you did, too.

This Is Spinal Tap
One of the amazing things about Spinal Tap was the fact that hard rock had not yet reached the apex of its stupidity. “Big Bottom” preceded “Cherry Pie” by six years. 

Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
Hollywood Shuffle
ketchy.

Raising Arizona
My first and favorite Coen Bros. movie. 

48 Hrs.
Trading Places
Beverly Hills Cop
Raw
Coming to America
I think Cop was the first R-rated movie I saw in theaters. Eddie Murphy was huge.

Fletch
I met sportswriter Rick Reilly early in my writing career, and he was kind to me. But it was once said of him that he gives off the impression that he wishes he was the guy who wrote Fletch. It was not meant as a compliment. Still, good movie.

A Fish Called Wanda

Modern Romance
Lost in America
Both movies feature really funny scenes of Albert Brooks interacting with an older man (the sound engineer, the casino boss) who finds him annoying. 

Brazil

Airplane!
I realized after reading this essay that I’m not a big fan of joke-driven movies. I don’t think I ever paid to see a Naked Gun movie. I’ve never seen Space Balls or Top Secret! But Airplane!? Real recognize real.

The Princess Bride
When Harry Met Sally…
Rob Reiner is the Don Mattingly of directors—a guy with a great peak who couldn't sustain it over the course of a long career.

After Hours
Something Wild

Caddyshack
Stripes
Tootsie
Ghostbusters
Scrooged
Ghostbusters II
Yeah, yeah, Tootsie is Dustin Hoffman’s movie. But it looks cool in this list of Bill Murray efforts. The ’90s got off to kind of a rough start for Bill (Quick Change). But by decade’s end he had appeared in several memorable roles: Groundhog Day, Ed Wood, Kingpin and, of course, Rushmore.

Bull Durham
Major League
In addition to these two successful comedies, The Natural, Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams also came out in the ’80s. Bull Durham loses steam toward the end but is still probably the best sports movie ever. 

Splash
Bachelor Party
Big

Midnight Run
In this tribute to Run, TV critic Alan Sepinwall notes that it came out within five days of Die Hard. “If those two aren’t the best example of their respective sub-genres, they’re at least in the discussion.” (Sepinwall endorsed Hitless Wonder, by the way.)

Mr. Mom
National Lampoon’s Vacation
Sixteen Candles
The Breakfast Club
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
I think these are John Hughes’s five best movies. (He wrote but did not direct Mr. Mom and Vacation.) Your list might look different, because he made a lot of good movies. Vanity Fair contributor David Kamp wrote a piece about Hughes after his death that's really sharp. My first real girlfriend and I went to see Ferris Bueller on our first date, I think. 

Night Shift
Beetlejuice
You can see a rough outline of the Beetlejuice character in this obnoxious version of himself that Michael Keaton played in a short film for a prime-time Letterman special.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

The Blues Brothers

Roger and MeA documentary, yes, but still funny.

Broadcast News

She’s Gotta Have It
Do the Right Thing
Do the Right Thing, Broadcast News and other movies on this list would fall in the "dramedy" category.

Moonstruck

Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Say Anything
Heathers
Summer School
Clueless (1995) is an honorary ’80s movie.

Diner
Tin Men
ain Man
James Wolcott’s memoir conveys how fresh and exciting Diner and Blue Velvet were when they were released. I’m with Wolcott in that I felt more “pummeled” than intoxicated by Velvet, but I appreciate its originality. 

Hannah and Her Sisters
Crimes and Misdemeanors
“If it bends, it’s funny…”

Three Amigos
Roxanne
Planes, Trains & Automobiles
Parenthood
I saw Parenthood with Mike "Biggie" McDermott and others. Toward the end of the movie, when everything’s wrapping up in that Lowell Ganz-Babaloo Mandel way, Biggie whispered, “Gil likes the roller coaster, too.”

Used Cars
Overboard
Used Cars is essentially an R-rated Bad News Bears. Kurt Russell was a good Elvis, too. 

Back to the Future
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Assembling this list, I see that things started to break down a little bit toward the end of the decade. Big and Parenthood are fine in their own right, but they portended the navel-gazing that I associate with comedies of the early and mid ’90s—City Slickers being the archetype. One problem, I think, is that baby boomers were becoming a little too grown-up to work effectively in the genre. Harold Ramis, for instance, was pretty much done after Groundhog Day (1993).

David Martin left the newspaper business before it had a chance to tell him his place in the industry was no longer available. Follow him on Twitter: @david2martin.

Reggie Jackson's Missing $10K and the Failure to Reach Climax: 10 Pieces of Great Baseball Writing

Opening Day approaches. To get you in the mood, here are synopses of ten pieces of great baseball writing.​

Gay Talese’s 1966 profile of Joe DiMaggio
​Tom Verducci's 1999 profile of Sandy Koufax

Talese produced two of the most famous magazine profiles of the 1960s. His profile of Frank Sinatra, which appeared in Esquire in 1966, captured the singer as he approached 50, before he recorded the comeback album Strangers in the Night. A short time later, Talese profiled another prominent Italian-American at a similar stage in life. Joe DiMaggio had retired and was living in San Francisco with his widowed sister when Talese arrived. Like Sinatra, DiMaggio was initially an unwilling subject. Eventually, though, he allowed Talese to accompany him to the restaurants and golf courses where he spent his time. “I try to follow my subjects unobtrusively while observing them in revealing situations,” Talese once said.

The story ends at spring training, with DiMaggio taking swings in a batting cage, using Mickey Mantle’s bat:

“He hit three more squarely enough, and then he swung again and there was a hollow sound.

“‘Ohhh,’ DiMaggio yelled, dropping his bat, his fingers stung. “I was waiting for that one.’ He left the batting cage rubbing his hands together. The reporters watched. Nobody said anything. Then DiMaggio said to one of them, not in anger nor in sadness, but merely as a simple stated fact, ‘There was a time when you couldn’t get me out of there.’”

DiMaggio was a private man, but Koufax was “Rodmanesque” by comparison, according to this searching-for-Sandy piece. How private was Koufax? Verducci writes that when he attended the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship, he didn't tell his parents that he was also a member of the baseball team. 

Verducci doesn’t land an interview with Koufax, but he’s such a good reporter and writer that it doesn’t really matter. Great anecdote about Koufax’s dominance: He pitched deep into games so reliably that the relievers on his team used to treat the night before his starts "the way a sailor treats shore leave," in Verducci's telling. One day, Koufax did not appear strong enough to go his usual nine innings. His manager, Walter Alston, visited him on the mound.

"How do you feel, Sandy?" Alston asked.

"I'll be honest with you, Skip," Koufax said. "I feel a hell of a lot better than the guy you've got warming up."

David Remnick’s 1987 profile of Reggie Jackson

Remnick, who today edits The New Yorker, was a newspaper reporter in his late 20s when he spent time with Jackson, who was about to begin his final season. Jackson, one of the smarter players of his era, could see the end coming. “You don’t retire at your convenience,” he said. “You don’t die when you’re ready.”

Jackson liked money, and he presaged Michael Jordan as a corporate pitchman. A self-described “fence-sitter” on politics, he told Remnick: “I don’t want to put myself in a position to say too many things, because a lot of the people I’m in contact with are CEOs.” At one point in the story, Jackson has to cancel a dinner with John Scully, then the chief executive of Apple, because he’s temporarily misplaced a sack containing $10,000. Jacked and two flunkies, named Ted and Walt, scramble and eventually find the money in the trunk of a Porsche. Remnick writes: “Jackson’s relief was considerable, though nothing compared with Ted’s and Walt’s.”

The Worst Team Money Can Buy (1993) by Bob Klapisch and John Harper

Beat writers at rival newspapers wrote this book about the 1992 New York Mets, a team at the hard end of a golden era. The club, which lost 90 games, featured difficult characters, including Eddie Murray (“The free food’s upstairs,” he said to a reporter in an attempt to shoo him out of the clubhouse) and Howard Johnson (“a nice man turned werewolf by repeated failure in critical situations”), as well as the intelligent but self-destructive David Cone. In the book, the writers describe how Cone went out drinking after the game in Atlanta when he let runners score while arguing with an umpire. Cone showed up at a bar where the writers were having beers and bought them a round. The writers ordered a shot for Cone, who downed it, rushed out the door, threw up on the sidewalk, calmly returned to thank the writers and resumed drinking. In another part of the book, Cone wonders aloud about what it would be like to be hung like Darryl Strawberry, even for a day: “I’d like to see how much my life would change.”

Bottom of the 33rd (2011) by Dan Barry

In 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings played a game that lasted eight hours before the umpires finally sent everyone home. Wade Boggs and Cal Ripken Jr. played in the epic game, which this book recounts in terrific detail, but the author doesn’t give their stories more weight than those of Dave Koza, Drungo Hazewood and others who played only briefly in the major leagues, if at all. Barry also tracks down the team executives, reporters and fans—only 19 were left when the game was called—who were a part of the bizarre night, which Barry suggests “morphed into some kind of extravagant form of performance art, in which the failure to reach climax is the point.” 

Halted at 4 a.m., after 32 innings, the game resumed later in the season. It took just one inning and 18 minutes to complete.

Roger Angell’s 1980 profile of Bob Gibson

Ted Williams thought that pitchers were “dumb by breed.” Bob Gibson felt similarly about hitters. “I don’t know what’s the matter with so many hitters—it’s like their brains small up,” he told Angell when The New Yorker writer visited the proud and competitive right-hander in Omaha, five years into his retirement.

Gibson had recently moved into a new house at the time Angell visited. It was summer. They went for a dip in the pool. Angel writes:

“The pool was built to Gibson’s design; its sides and bottoms are painted black—a da Vinci-like idea of his, meant to help the water keep the heat of the sun in the spring and fall. Somehow, though, he had not remembered the warmth of mid-summer Nebraska sunshine, and when he and I slipped into the inky waves, the water temperature stood at ninety-two degrees—only a fraction cooler than the steamy, locust-loud night air. ‘Another mistake,’ Gibson said mildly.’”

Tom Verducci’s 2003 profile of Rickey Henderson

Henderson was 44 years old and playing in an independent league when Verducci wrote this appreciation of a “modern-day Yogi Berra, only faster.” The story of Henderson’s legend is mostly through the eyes of the players, managers and executives who had worked with him over his long career. 

An A’s traveling security describes how Henderson liked to report late to spring training, a habit Jose Canseco picked up: “He didn't want to report before Jose did. So Rickey would drive into camp, and if he didn't see Jose's car parked there, he'd drive back out. Rickey made sure he was the last one to report."

Alex Rodriguez tells of the season they played together in Seattle: "Sometimes he'd come back to the dugout after an umpire called him out, and I'd go, 'Rickey, was that a strike?' And he'd go, 'Maybe, but not to Rickey.' "

The prologue to Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo

Underworld is a Cold War novel that opens at the Dodgers-Giants playoff game in 1951 that ended on Bobby Thompson's famous home run. The game took on added meaning for DeLillo when he learned that it coincided with the U.S. government's announcement that the Soviet Union had tested an atomic bomb. I haven't finished the novel (it's 800 pages), but the prologue is amazing. In fact, it was released as novella in 2001, four years after Underworld was published.

DeLillo describes Giants manager Leo Durocher as "hard-rock Leo, the gashouse scrapper, a face straight from the Gallic Wars." Near the Giants' dugout sat Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover. In DeLillo's telling, Gleason pukes as Thompson hits the home run, distracting Sinatra as the celebration envelops the Polo Grounds:

"Frank persists in looking down. He allows one foot to list to port so he can examine the side of his shoe for vomit marks. These are handcrafted shoes from a narrow street with a quaint name in old London.

"And Shor says, 'We just won unbelievable, they're ripping up the joint, I don't know whether to laugh, shit or go blind.'

"And Frank says, 'I'm rooting for number one or number three.'"

"99 Reasons Why Baseball is Better Than Football" by Thomas Boswell

A sample from the column Boswell wrote for The Washington Post in 1987:

No 20. Eighty degrees, a cold beer, and a short-sleeve shirt are better than thirty degrees, a hip flask, and six layers of clothes under a lap blanket. Take your pick: sunshine or frostbite.

No. 35: Football has Tank and Mean Joe. Baseball has the Human Rain Delay and Charlie Hustle.

No 45. The entire NFL playoff system is a fraud. Go on, explain with a straight face why the Chiefs (10-6) were in the playoffs in 1986 but the Seahawks (10-6) were not. There is no real reason. Seattle was simply left out for convenience. When baseball tried the comparably bogus split-season fiasco with half-season champions in 1981, fans almost rioted.

73. The majority of players on a football field in any game are lost and unaccountable in the middle of pileups. Confusion hides a multitude of sins. Every baseball player's performance and contribution are measured and recorded in every game.

The Numbers Game (2005) by Alan Schwarz

Number crunching hardly began with Bill James. In this history of baseball statistics, Schwarz describes how the effort to quantify performance is nearly as old as the game itself. In 1906, a newspaper writer went through scorebooks in an attempt to determine the true value of the sacrifice and the stolen base. Branch Rickey had a numbers guy. Two brothers used IBM punch cards to determine that Tug McGraw had been the best pitcher in the National League in 1969 based on his Player Win Average, the Wins Above Replacement level of its day. 

Of course, in spite of this rich history, baseball continues to allow flat-earthers to sit in positions of authority. Where I live, stats-minded Royals fans are debating the extent to which Ned Yost will hurt the team with his calls for sacrifice bunts in the early innings of games. Yost's tactics have been discredited but he gets to keep making them because, as a player, he was good enough at the sport to break into the major leagues but not good enough (he appeared in 219 games) to make the kind of money that lasts a lifetime. In short, he's "baseball man," and that's who gets to manage baseball teams.

​David Martin worked at alternative newspapers before abandoning ship. He lives in Kansas City and roots for the Indians. Follow him on Twitter: @david2martin