It was hot in Beverly Hills this afternoon.<\/p>\n
I’d gone to the Polo Lounge to have lunch with Ellis Rich, Chairman of the PRS.\u00c2\u00a0 As we discussed the minimum YouTube royalty, two gentlemen got up from their table and started walking towards us.\u00c2\u00a0 I immediately recognized Terry Semel, late of Yahoo, formerly of Warner Brothers, but it took me a moment to realize he was with Les Moonves.\u00c2\u00a0 I mistook Les for Brad Grey at first.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re both perfecting that boyish look.\u00c2\u00a0 Wherein they can flash smiles like fourteen year olds to the press, but rant and rave to their inner circle.<\/p>\n
And a few moments later Helen Hunt emerged from the mists.\u00c2\u00a0 People talk shit about her personal life, but she’s such a great actress.<\/p>\n
And then that teen phenom who now syndicates his own talk show.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s his name again?\u00c2\u00a0 Byron Allen, that’s right, it comes back to me now.\u00c2\u00a0 He was bouncing a new baby on his chest.\u00c2\u00a0 He looked old, which is no crime, but my memory told me he was still young.<\/p>\n
But the host of "Inside The Actors Studio", you know, the self-righteous interviewer who has now managed to become a star himself, he was so aged as to make one contemplate one’s own mortality.\u00c2\u00a0 We don’t live forever you know.<\/p>\n
That’s what I’ve been contemplating for the past month or two.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the end of the ski season.\u00c2\u00a0 But for the first time ever, I can foresee the fall, cold weather will come again, quite soon, in fact.\u00c2\u00a0 But I never perceived the seasons moving this fast.\u00c2\u00a0 Makes me realize that one only gets to see so many springs and so many falls.\u00c2\u00a0 And then there are none at all.<\/p>\n
I contemplated all this as I emerged from the Beverly Hills Hotel.\u00c2\u00a0 It was positively hot.\u00c2\u00a0 The kind of heat that makes you want to go home and put on your shorts, maybe take a ride by the beach.\u00c2\u00a0 Suddenly, it’s summer.<\/p>\n
And I’ve come to hate summer.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s too damn hot.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s the price you pay for winter.\u00c2\u00a0 The only way to beat the system is to travel south of the equator every June.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s gaming the system.<\/p>\n
And after arriving home, changing into my aforementioned shorts, and catching up on some e-mail and the newspapers, I went into my bedroom and fired up my Kindle.\u00c2\u00a0 You see I’m hooked on a book.\u00c2\u00a0 "Olive Kitteridge".<\/p>\n
I didn’t mean to read it.\u00c2\u00a0 I was looking for something else.<\/p>\n
I wanted to purchase the Vanderbilt biography, especially now that they’d dropped the price to ten bucks, after the Kindle community outcry.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s eight hundred pages in hardcover, and non-fiction.\u00c2\u00a0 I needed something to take me away.\u00c2\u00a0 Only fiction would do.\u00c2\u00a0 The stories may be made up, but when done right, they’re more truthful than any real life accounting.<\/p>\n
So I’m surfing the Kindle store, looking at the best sellers.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s akin to the\u00c2\u00a0 music business.\u00c2\u00a0 Anybody who’s an educated reader wants nothing to do with these quickie, genre, made for a market tomes.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course there are exceptions, there are even great mysteries, but generally speaking, you don’t want what’s in the Top Forty and you don’t want what’s on the best seller list.\u00c2\u00a0 But I desired to read a book. And a flash occurred in my brain.\u00c2\u00a0 That woman who writes those nice stories, the ones about the slightly twisted families, what was her name, "Elizabeth Strout"?\u00c2\u00a0 Her new book had gotten such a great review.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll download that, at least it will be easy to read.<\/p>\n
So that’s how I ended up with a sample of "Olive Kitteridge" on my Kindle.\u00c2\u00a0 Which resembled the work of the author I was thinking of not a whit.\u00c2\u00a0 The story started off with too much description, a style faux pas to me.\u00c2\u00a0 But by time I figured out I had the wrong book, I was hooked. You see the writing had the ring of truth.\u00c2\u00a0 When the sample chapter ended, I immediately bought the rest.\u00c2\u00a0 I not only needed to know what happened, I didn’t want the warm fuzzy blanket of life lifted, I wanted to bask in the peculiar frailty, the ins and outs of the human race.<\/p>\n
Turns out the book is one of linked short stories.\u00c2\u00a0 The only ongoing character is Olive Kitteridge herself.\u00c2\u00a0 And in some chapters her appearance is as fleeting as a Hitchcock cameo.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s tough to start over, after getting hooked on one person’s story, but each vignette has one line, one situation, which describes life perfectly, causing you to hit the Next Page button, continuing to read.<\/p>\n
There’s the pharmacist, actually Olive’s husband, Henry, who hires a new girl whose spouse gets killed.\u00c2\u00a0 He keeps his distance, but comes to acknowledge to himself he’s in love with her.\u00c2\u00a0 And she reveals she feels the same way about him.\u00c2\u00a0 And this causes…silence.\u00c2\u00a0 You know how love with no future is.\u00c2\u00a0 Instead of coming together, you end up with something akin to hate.\u00c2\u00a0 You try to repel the person, it’s better than the unending yearning.\u00c2\u00a0 And this pushing away is not conscious, rather it’s instinctual.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, decades later, when Henry can finally stop fighting the feeling, and revel in it, when the girl lives thousands of miles away, he realizes his wife, Olive, was in love with a fellow teacher, and he runs to her and asks…YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LEAVE ME, ARE YOU? Marriage is complicated.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s got a life of its own.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s not all peaches and cream, sailing into the sunset.\u00c2\u00a0 But you’re together for a reason, and this reason keeps you staying together.<\/p>\n
Then again, another character leaves his wife for someone who’s a wrong fit on paper.\u00c2\u00a0 Because his wife rejects physicality and this new woman…she wants to know him, what his favorite song is, the minor details that make you who you are that get pushed down inside, yet are yearning to get out.<\/p>\n
Then there’s the training psychiatrist, about to commit suicide…\u00c2\u00a0 The only person he can trust is his psychiatrist.\u00c2\u00a0 Who warned him his girlfriend was crazy, that she’d leave him.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet this young man can’t relinquish the connection with his lost love.\u00c2\u00a0 But moments before he’s going to take his own life, he’s forced into rescuing an old classmate being carried away by the surf.\u00c2\u00a0 Funny how you want to end it, and then you fight so hard to keep going.<\/p>\n
This isn’t the only suicide talk in the book.\u00c2\u00a0 Which takes place in a small coastal town in Maine.\u00c2\u00a0 As Joni Mitchell once sang, "we all live so close to that line, and so far from satisfaction".\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that in public life, no one can acknowledge this.\u00c2\u00a0 The media wants winners.\u00c2\u00a0 Or complete losers.\u00c2\u00a0 But most people are just average.\u00c2\u00a0 Not that there’s anything wrong with that.\u00c2\u00a0 But who is delineating the hopes and dreams, the losses of everyman.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s great art.\u00c2\u00a0 When you can reflect ourselves back upon us.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s what Elizabeth Strout has done here.<\/p>\n
In a world where business people are constantly trying to hoodwink us, with extensive marketing and constant barking to pay attention, it’s easy to get beaten down, to get frustrated.\u00c2\u00a0 Almost nothing lives up to the billing.\u00c2\u00a0 But when something does, you want to tell everybody about it.<\/p>\n
Life is personal.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s just that no one wants to address your world.\u00c2\u00a0 The rappers want to talk about bitches and ho’s.\u00c2\u00a0 Mariah Carey wants us to know how fabulous her life is.\u00c2\u00a0 And Oprah Winfrey gives a commencement speech wherein she says how great it is to have a private jet.<\/p>\n
Must be.\u00c2\u00a0 But most people don’t.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people are struggling.\u00c2\u00a0 With some victories interspersed.\u00c2\u00a0 You live, and then you die.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a curious journey, that we’re dying to make sense of.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, dying.\u00c2\u00a0 Every single day we’re closer to the end.\u00c2\u00a0 Are we using our time wisely?\u00c2\u00a0 Should we grab hold, take action, or is it just plain futile, and should we accept our fate.<\/p>\n
I don’t know.<\/p>\n
But I do know reading "Olive Kitteridge" I was not only taken to Maine, but to Vermont, to the location of so many important episodes in my own life.\u00c2\u00a0 What’s it like in the Mad River Valley today?\u00c2\u00a0 I can go to the cams, get pictures, but what’s it like to walk out the front door, breathe in the blooming flora and feel the sun upon your face?\u00c2\u00a0 Statistics are interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 Facts are important.\u00c2\u00a0 But emotions rule the world.<\/p>\n
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