"Helping" (1987)

Read story by Robert Stone online.

Robert Stone's story is an absurdist and vaguely comical tale of an alcoholic relapse. It's gnawing at something deeper, but I'm not sure I know what that is any better than the two central characters, Chas Elliott and his wife Grace. He is a social worker giving in to burnout. She is a Child Protective Services lawyer. She wants to help but needs the layer of legal formalities to shield her from raw human drama. Chas is also a Vietnam veteran. At this point, I'm tired of Vietnam veterans and recovering alcoholic stories. I appreciate that the focus here is on the relapse, as that is one of the hardest and most mysterious sides of addiction and recovery. But I don't think it has much more to offer than the usual self-dramatizations. There are some exchanges between Chas and Grace that are bitter and caustic, but not particularly believable. They seem too disconnected from their evident rage, too poised and cool and articulate. The drama of alcoholism was popular and widely embraced in the '80s. We saw another example in a story earlier in this collection, Richard Bausch's "All the Way in Flagstaff, Arizona," which I didn't find much more convincing than this. Partly it's the literary aspects, so deliberately thought through, such as the many meanings and tones of the one-word title in the Stone story (or the parallel ambiguities of using "in" instead of "to" in the Bausch). Am I saying they're too good to be good? Well, yes, in a way. The drama in "Helping" is strange and hard to understand from the outside looking in, which is where Stone puts us. The attitudes of Chas—you can't understand if you're not a Vietnam veteran and/or recovering alcoholic—are difficult to separate from Stone's, if indeed they are different at all. They probably are. The two novels by Stone that I know—Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise—are very good as I recall. And "Helping" is obviously worked over and thought through to an admirable degree. I'm just not sure that the drama of alcoholism (which more and more seems to me related to narcissistic disorders) offers enough to support the long and artful exercise of this story.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Third Stone From the Sun" (1967)

(listen)

A high school pal sat me down with Are You Experienced. I had been somewhat intrigued by the raggedly textured bouncy-ball of "Purple Haze" as it briefly flitted across the AM airwaves when I was in junior high, no doubt within the context of the reputation of the mysterious Jimi Hendrix and my burgeoning fascination with underground counterculture. Hearing the whole album really opened up Hendrix for me once and for all, and it was songs like "The Wind Cries Mary" and this that did it for me. "Third Stone From the Sun" is at once so blown-open and so gentle, a weird mix of the lush and the inhuman, the harsh and daffy, making a conceit out of the god-like perspective of the title and never shrinking from going as big as it can. Wonder of wonders, that's pretty big—bigger than anyone could have imagined for a little pop song. I use "little pop song" figuratively because this song is mostly instrumental and all of 6:44 and it is actually epic, big as worlds as they say, a vast vision, encompassing and superseding the solar system and/or galaxy itself, and finally an end-of-the-world story. The words are fragmentary, with many long patches obscured and virtually indecipherable from the production, but the story is about aliens coming to visit the earth (in a "kinky machine"), disapproving of what they find, and destroying us. It's also very funny: "Although your world wonders me, / With your majestic and superior cackling hen / Your people I do not understand, / So to you I shall put an end / And you'll / Never hear / Surf music again." Dick Dale wept. When the end comes it is strange and desolate and elegiac and moving, a song once heard never forgotten. Anybody still not sure about Hendrix, start here.

That's My Bush! (2001)

USA, TV series (Comedy Central)
Creators: Trey Parker, Matt Stone
Cast: Timothy Bottoms, Carrie Quinn Dolin, Kurt Fuller, Marcia Wallace, Kristen Miller, John D'Aquino

Some things you should know if you're going to take my word that this is worth tracking down. First, while I have some appreciation for animated sitcoms—I love "The Simpsons," for example (as who doesn't?)—my preference is for real people and blocking and the three-camera setup and all that, which this basically is. I even appreciate the sound of laughter, canned or otherwise. Second, I have never developed a taste for "South Park," whose creators are behind this (and I'm afraid my excuse is that "the voices are too scratchy," but I do understand that's lame and fully intend one day to give it the fair chance I keep hearing it deserves). As for "That's My Bush!"—there are only eight episodes total to this brilliant Comedy Central sitcom parody. Each and every one is pure gold, spot-on and very funny, ripping off the likes of Jackie Gleason, "Father Knows Best," "Andy Griffith," "Dennis the Menace," "Mr. Ed," "Bewitched," and many more, all at once and repeatedly and in any number of refreshing, surprising ways. (There are even more or less animated characters showing up too, such as an antiabortion leader, with and without scratchy voices.) The thing to remember, this far out from those early days of the Bush administration, is that this is and always was intended more as a hopelessly loving parody of the classic sitcom form itself than derision aimed at the Bush administration, for the sake of which it was discontinued without looking back approximately one minute following Bush's public reading of My Pet Goat to a classroom of children in Sarasota, Florida. In that way it is also a fascinating document of the brief sliver of time when the ineptitude and unwarranted arrogance of Bush, Cheney & crew were still things that could be coped with by laughing (if one could overlook or momentarily forget December 12, 2000).

(For those following along, this concludes my list of my favorite movies of 2009, some of which were not movies and most of which were not released in 2009, though seen by me for the first time then. We now return to something that I'd like to think of as normal programming, with a stepped-up schedule of music along with "the usual" book club Sundays and "the new" "movie" Fridays, according to the limits of my stamina.)