Valley Futures

1% for the Planet may be one of Mad River Valley, Vermont’s best-kept secrets. Housed on the top floor of downtown Waitsfield’s old high school building on Main Street, the organization (which recently relocated to Vermont from southern New England) “exists to build and support an alliance of businesses financially committed to creating a healthy planet,” according to CEO Terry Kellogg. 1% serves as a global broker of good will on the planet’s behalf, linking profitable and socially responsible businesses that donate 1% of their annual sales to environmentally-focused organizations with a growing network of conservation-minded nonprofits (more than 1500 are now on the 1% roster) always on the lookout for new financial resources to expand their good work. To date, 1% for the Planet has 1100 companies in 38 countries contributing $50 million through the 1% network – not too shabby.

And, on the artistic front, 1% for the Planet has gotten into the music promotion business, recently releasing what may be the most remarkable musical compilation of the new year: a collection of 41 songs donated by musicians from around the world who support the organization’s work.

How did this ground-breaking musical project come about?

“We realize the power artists have to inspire,” explains Kellogg. “Pop star Jack Johnson was our fiftieth member; when he traveled on his ‘In Between Dreams’ tour we watched the phone ring off the hook, town-by-town, as he traveled around the world playing and sharing his sustainability message. Music rallies artists, fans, companies and nonprofits together; fans listen to an artist’s music and are inspired to get involved themselves,” Kellogg concludes. “The music compilation is an easy way to make a difference for anyone who loves good music.”

Or as one featured 1% artist, Spring Standards, humorously put it: “We were pretty sure that a compilation of songs by really smart scientists would suck, so we musicians are doing what we can to help out, and hope everyone else does the same.”

So when you buy the 1% for the Planet music collection – all the financial proceeds go to support 1%’s work.

And here’s the kicker: the 1% collection – all 41 songs – costs a mere $10.00.
It is easily the biggest bargain, musically speaking, I’ve seen (and heard) in a long time.
And, in keeping with 1%’s commitment to sustainability, the music is available online, through iTunes, Amazon, and other digital streaming sites. Even cooler? 1% has made an online “widget” available to any organization interested in promoting the 1% project, so other organizations interested in supporting the 1% message can help get the word out easily and effectively.

And the best part of all is the music itself.

True confessions.

It took me and my kids two weeks of “in car” listening before we finally pushed ourselves past the first five tunes to get to the next thirty six.
The opening songs were that good.

Here’s a quick audio run down.

The 1% Project opens with the incomparably gifted songwriter Josh Ritter of New York City singing “Great Big Heart,” a beautiful stripped down acoustic six-string ballad that must be heard to be believed. On track 2, Madi Diaz (one of the dozens of artists on this collection whom I had never heard of before) follows up with a bouncy toe tapping pop number called “Nothing at All,” (my kids’ current fave), while “Prodigal Son,” the collection’s third track, features Aidan Hawken performing one of the most hooky and haunting sonically interesting songs I’ve heard in years. Folkie Mason Jennings gruffly sings “How Deep Is That River” on track 4, with an unexpected musical up-tempo change up midway through the tune, while Mad River’s very own Grace Potter performs a beautiful ballad entitled “Til The Morning Comes Around” – just Grace and her acoustic guitar – on track 5. I was completely hooked by the time I heard the immediately recognizable voice of the 1% project’s biggest musical name, Jackson Browne, performing a live version of “About My Imagination” on track 6.

And the project goes on like that for another 35 songs. Truly incredible. Just a few other highlights: Birdmonster’s roadhouse-worthy rocker “Yuma” (track 18), Chris Velan’s brilliantly written “Sandpaper Shoes” (track 25), and Lori McKenna’s achingly soulful “Mercy Now” (track 28) were all standouts for me. But I have to confess to liking just about every single song on this project, and the mixing and mastering of so many different tunes into a single ear-appealing sonic collection was equally impressive, from a production standpoint.

In short, if you are an acoustic music lover of blues, folk, traditional, or Americana music, you can’t go wrong dropping a mere $10 to buy an entire library of new artists for your collection, while supporting Vermont’s newest socially-conscious nonprofit in the process.

Find out everything more you need to know at http://music.onepercentfortheplanet.org/.

And enjoy the experience of listening to these gifted musicians sing to help keep the Earth in business.

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More than 160 Vermonters threw down $50 per ticket Monday night to join hometown heroine Grace Potter at the Big Picture Theater in a musical benefit for the people of earthquake-ravaged Haiti. The Eames Brothers warmed up the lively audience with an hour of upbeat roots-y blues, accompanied by Nocturnals drummer Matt (a.k.a. Cado) Burr, before Grace took the stage at 9:30 in a rare solo (and I use the term loosely) performance for the standing-room-only crowd.

Big Picture owner Claudia Becker introduced Grace by thanking everyone for raising more than $10,000 for Haiti to be channeled through a local nonprofit called Amurtel. The fundraising included young Mad River Valley’ites who contributed their art to the Waitsfield Elementary School art auction currently on display in the Big Picture lobby. (Don’t miss it!)

Amurtel’s Joni Zweig, who was on the ground in Haiti assisting earthquake victims just two days after the January 12 disaster, spoke movingly about the tragedy, the resilience of the Haitian people, the importance of music and dance, and her hope that Vermonters would remember to support Haiti and the Haitian people in the weeks ahead.

With “Creature From The Black Lagoon” playing on the giant movie screen behind her, Grace kicked off the evening with a soulful acoustic guitar version of “Take Me Down To The Water,” followed by an acoustic version of “Ah Mary,” a thinly-veiled critique of the U.S. Empire and the first track of GPN’s most recent release “This Is Somewhere.”

Like so:

She’s the beat of my heart/
She’s the shot of a gun/
She’ll be the end of me and maybe everyone/
Ah Mary Ca…”

Grace then moved to the keyboard where she introduced “Colors,” a gorgeous song to be featured on her soon-to-be-released new album exploring Americans’ varied reactions to the Obama 2008 presidential election, written, she explained, when she was in St. Louis.

Here is a bit of the chorus:

This is the greatest time of day/
When all the clocks are spinning backward/
and all the ropes that bind begin to fray
And all the black and white turns in to colors.

Grace then led into another new Nocturnals collaboration, with Benny (GPN’s newest guitarist) and Matt Burr jumping up on stage to help sing about a woman who’s “got the medicine that everybody wants,” with a rousing instrumental finale that infused the Monday night crowd with renewed energy. They followed this up with an electric guitar screamer featuring both Grace and Benny on the six strings (times two), and an “Oo La La call and response” format that got the crowd going.

Explaining that a Nocturnals trio (Grace, Benny and Matt) was soon heading to London for a series of gigs during their official time off, the band then moved into “Ain’t No Time” from “This Is Somewhere,” playing it as a straight-ahead rocker with some tasty Hammond B organ licks for solo fodder. (Grace confided that the band hadn’t played that one in a year.)

The moment of transcendence, for me anyway, came late in the evening, when Grace performed both “Apologies” and “Big White Gate” solo with just the organ, lit by Big Picture lighting technician James Kinne’s deep green pinpoint laser light arrangement, before closing with a few classics, including a shimmying version of an old Otis Redding favorite – “Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay.”

All in all, a beautiful evening of music for a good cause. Mad River has much for which to be thankful, as our community reached out to the people of Haiti on a clear winter night.

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Maybe it is something in the water (or oil?), but American imperial pop culture suddenly seems to have taken over by some strange apocalyptic vision. Novels like M.T. Anderson’s Feed and James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand; television shows like CBS’ “Jericho,” ABC’s “Lost,” and Fox’s “24;” and recent films like The Road, based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the deeply bleak but strangely compelling writer Cormac McCarthy all construct stories of a civilization teetering on the brink, or already engulfed in flames.

“Art mirrors life,” as the old saying goes, and sometimes, art even anticipates life, creating fictitious futures that, if grounded in some prescient or prophetic vision, may help us real-life denizens of this thing we call “reality” wrap our heads and hearts around the emerging realization that our new 21st century is shaping up to be very little like the 20th.

“The Book Of Eli” is such a film. Set in the not-too-distant future, the movie stars Denzel Washington as the aptly-named Eli/Walker, a lone and mysterious figure who makes his way westward against a blasted wasteland that once was American consumer civilization in all of its materialistic glory. Charred cars, blackened human bodies, emaciated kitty cats, collapsed bridges, the remains of KFC wrappers and mp3 devices – all the tropes of life after “The Flash” – are immediately brought to bear in scenes that look and feel very much like The Road. This post-nuke world is one Thomas Hobbes recognized: life is nasty, brutish and short, powerful men dominate, women are relegated to servants, sous chefs, and sex objects, and children seem completely absent. Lucky them.

Eli/Walker is well-equipped to cope with the frightening obstacles that immediately block his path as the film opens – most menacingly, marauding gangs of deformed men who pillage, rape, and kill at will. Turns out, Walker is handy with knives, bows, and guns – and proves his bad-ass mettle by dispatching two posses of bad guys in the film’s opening scenes with little more than a few whispered words and some well-timed martial arts maneuvering. Things get a bit more complicated, however, when Walker finds himself in a frontier town run by a sinister baddie named Carnegie (played with a bit of a smile by Gary Oldman). Carnegie serves as the town’s “mayor” (for lack of a better term), and works his will by – surprise! – physically abusing women, wielding threats through his organized gang of thugs, and verbally abusing his underlings. Ho hum. This has all been done before, and even Denzel Washington’s cool persona doesn’t quite kick in enough to keep the viewer from stifling a few yawns.

But then, things get a bit more interesting. Turns out, Carnegie is looking for a special book (hint: the Bible) that he believes will give him the power to restore civilization to the burnt-out landscape (in a brief but funny scene, we learn that The DaVinci Code doesn’t make the cut – when his men bring him several copies, Carnegie orders them all burned.) Eli/Walker is in possession of some sort of a book, as it turns out (See hint above), and Carnegie, deciding that this is the book he seeks, sets out to wrest the text from Walker, by femme fatale or force, if necessary.

How events play out I leave for you to discover. Suffice to say, though, in the Age of the Image, it is refreshing to have so much post-apocalyptic attention paid to, yes, a BOOK. While the film leaves this typography-might-save-humanity theme grossly underexplored, to its detriment, there are a few interesting surprises that unfold before film’s end. And it is somehow comforting to think that books – those tangible cultural, historical and even sacred artifacts that connect us with generations and civilizations that have come before, now ignored in a world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube – might offer us some sort of continuity as we collectively move into what will surely be interesting times ahead.

And the film’s ending is actually worth the wait. To say more would ruin the surprises.

Can I get an Amen, brothers and sisters?

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The opening scene of director Jason Reitman’s new film “Up In The Air” features a soulful yet deeply ironic version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” – accompanied by aerial shots of Anywhere, USA from 10,000 feet up. The familiar tune, repackaged tongue in cheek, is quickly followed by a quick-cut montage of newly-fired anonymous company employees – the white collar workers of a troubled U.S. economy – unpacking their souls in front of the camera.

Their attentive listener is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a professional pink slip dispenser and occasional motivational speaker whose chief raison d’etre is to remain in perpetual motion, forever between places, time zones, and relationships. “To know me is to fly with me,” explains Bingham, who delivers “how big is your backpack” advice to rapt if road-weary conference attendees who quietly gather in random hotel conference rooms, when he is not deftly downsizing unfortunate white collar types in rapid-fire solipsistic sojourns to Dallas, Omaha, Miami, Chicago, and other cities from coast to coast. “I tell people how to avoid commitment,” he confides to the audience at one point.

“The Road” is Ryan’s home, and he much prefers a nomadic existence of permanent weightlessness as a so-called “transition specialist” – 270 days in flight – to the realities of living on the ground. Light on his feet, Bingham has made his peace with life “up in the air,” including a new-found occasional romantic rendezvous with a woman named Alex, a fellow “elite status” traveler, with whom Bingham enjoys witty verbal banter and casual sex. “Just think of me as yourself,” Alex explains to Bingham via mobile phone, “only with a vagina.”

All is well with Ryan Bingham and his quest to attain his goal of 10 million travel miles, until his world is rocked by a young and confident new consultant named Natalie Keener who convinces company management to embrace a “glocal” policy of “virtual downsizing” via tele-screen. Suddenly, Bingham’s bedouin-like suitcase-savvy happy-traveler world is turned upside down, but he sees an opportunity to educate Keener in the hows and whys of “making limbo tolerable” for newly-canned corporate
unfortunates. “I stereotype,” he explains to Keener in one of a dozen airports in the film. “It’s faster.”

Director Reitman has a knack for channeling the American cultural zeitgeist. His last film, “Thank You For Smoking,” arrived in theaters just as American public opinion turned on the tobacco companies in earnest. In a 21st century America marked by severe recession (we can’t use the “d” word – yet), massive job layoffs, and an uncertain future, “Up In The Air” explores difficult territory, especially when we hear the voices of those employees cast adrift by the impersonal vagaries of corporate misfortune (apparently Reitman captured interviews with the real-life downsized as fodder for the film.) And the arch-eyed, cynical, and slightly-off-kilter George Clooney, in his guise as Ryan Bingham of the Empty Backpack, is a near-perfect divining stick for channeling the mojo that infuses our post-modern Facebook-surfing, cellphone sporting civilization of yak yak, marked by euphemistic buzz phrases and a culture grounded in nothing but placeless-ness and shallow expressions of good will. “This is America, this is what we were promised,” one character confides to him toward the film’s end. “Oh, really?” Reitman seems to be asking.

And yet, oddly, Reitman manages some nods to our essential humanity here – in the drunken Cyndi Lauper karaoke, the perfunctory pillow talk via text messages, and his sophisticated if subtle sense that the transitory nature of “practicing protocol” might ultimately lead to something more lasting. “You have set up a life of permanent self-banishment,” Keener snarls at Bingham in one tense moment. Perhaps, and it is Bingham’s insistence on face-to-face firing over virtual axe-dropping that represents the last relational thread connecting him to his fellow man.

And in the real world of the U.S. Empire, with the airline industry in the throes of semi-permanent bankruptcy, job losses at 20 percent nationally, the federal government at the mercy of the Big Banksters, and the specter of Peak Oil knocking on the door, “exploring our options,” as Keener so happily phrases it, and turning to our neighbors and friends for deliberate community building on the ground, may be our best collective step forward, a more realistic 21st century alternative to life “up in the air.”

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A Valley Futures Network Task Team has been formed to look at the question: would a local entrepreneurial Food and Agriculture Business Initiative work in the Valley and if so what might it look like? The Team is sponsoring some upcoming talks in the next months that bring in people from other towns that are doing similar initiatives.

On February 10th Andrew Meyer from the Center for an Agricultural Community will talk about their initiative in Hardwick.
The event will take place at the Big Picture on 2/10 from 6:30-9pm with coffee/dessert.

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Based on the success of this past fall’s MRV focused UVM course, Local Community Initiatives, instructor Chip Sawyer is planning a second round in the fall of 2010. Now is the time to start planning the course, and more importantly, brainstorming potential projects.

The UVM course Local Community Initiatives is a service-learning course that allows undergraduate and graduate students to contribute to community projects in the Mad River Valley.  This course will be held in the fall of 2010.  The course was very successful and valuable for both students and Mad River Valley residents, alike, in the fall of 2009.  The final project reports are available at the Mad River Valley Planning District website at http://www.mrvpd.org/DocumentsLibrary.php.

Please see attached the course description and the list of expectations for students and project partners.

During the first weeks of the course, the students will choose from among 3-5 projects in the Mad River Valley.  Now is the time for interested community members to propose projects.  The projects will be compiled by the Mad River Valley Planning District and the Valley Futures Network.  A steering committee made up the of the course instructor, the Executive Director of the Mad River Valley Planning District, members of the Valley Futures Network, and other Mad River Valley community members will consider the projects submitted and choose a list to be proposed to the students.

Projects will be chosen based on:

• the likelihood of a project to be completed by students in the fall and winter of 2010;
• the learning potential that a project presents to the students and community partners;
• the extent to the which the project will contribute to efforts and partnerships going forward; and
• the impact that the project could have upon the Mad River Valley.

The deadline for projects is March 15th.

UVM Project Submittal Form Fall 2010.doc

List of Projects (originally compiled for Fall 2009 class)

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VFN Monthly Meeting Minutes of 01/08/10

Attendees: Susan Klein, Rob Williams, Jared Cadwell, Stan Ward, Joshua Schwartz, Dan Holtz, Amy Todisco, David Hartshorn, Gregor Barnum, Peter Forbes, Ginny McGinn, Jen Higgins, David Dion, Tom Barefoot, Susan Johnson, Suzie Snow, Jill Arace, Geri Pocachinni???, Mike Dupee, Carmen Dupee, and John Donaldson

1) Time Bank –    Jen, Suzie and Geri from Rootswork described this project which the Rootswork board has approved as a pilot project. They anticipate that 2010 will be a slow but steady building year to get to a critical mass of participants. The Time Bank is an organized system to exchange services, using “Community Weaver” software provided by timebanks.org.  It will be similar to the Onion River Exchange in Montpelier (see http://www.orexchange.org/).  The Onion River Exchange has grown from 35 members to over 300 in 28 towns.

Jen is pulling a working group together and would like VFN participation to make it a collaborative effort.  Anyone interested in working on this should contact Jen.

2) Music Bank -  Mike Dupee presented this idea for bringing the Valley music community together.  It is still a work in progress.  The effort may kick off with an Open Mike night in February, perhaps to also help kick off the Time Bank.

3) Community Pot Luck -  The first potluck, organized by Jill Arace and Susan Klein will be held at the Waitsfield Church at 6 pm on January 24^th.  Posters made by Dan Holtz were distributed.  There may be music, but this will be done at the end so it doesn’t interfere with the social mixing.  People are encouraged to bring their own “plateware” in addition to a food item to share.  Help is needed to set up at 5:45.

4) Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants Update – Josh reported that 6 or the 7 local grant applicants made the first cut.  About $ 11 million was requested statewide for the $ 6 million that is available. More comprehensive applications are due February 2 and results will be announced in May.

5)   Update on Local Community Initiatives Class taught at UVM – Chip Sawyer reported that based on the resounding success of the recent class, another class will be given next fall and we should be thinking of projects for the students.  All information and output from the recent class is hosted on the Mad River Valley Planning District website (http://www.mrvpd.org/DocumentsLibrary.php).

6) Announcements –

1. Ad hoc agriculture group – Gregor announced the second meeting of this group will be February 15.  Hardwick representatives will be reporting on what they have done at this meeting.
2. Gross National Happiness International Conference – Tom Barefoot said the conference will take place in Burlington on June 1 – 4.  GNH is based on the premise that the calculation of “wealth” should consider other aspects besides economic development: the preservation of the environment and the quality of life of the people. (See http://gnhusa.org/).  Some background sessions will be held in February and the group is looking for volunteers to help test community measures to indicate progress.
3. Workshop – Susan Klein said Rob Williams is working with the MRV Chamber to lead a workshop on demystifying Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and other social media outlets. He will show how to use these Web 2.0 tools to further business and to work together through social media for general benefit of the MRV business community.  The workshop will be Tuesday, January 12 from 9am-noon at the Big Picture Theater. It is free to chamber members and $10 for all others.
4. New section on Mad River Valley.com website – see http://www.madrivervalley.com/vermont/directory/by_type.asp?catid=108 for a new section on Local Food Producers.
5. Another Karaoke Night -  organized by Dan Holtz will be held January 22 at the Big Picture.  Will Susan Klein give an encore performance of Harper Valley PTA?

Next meeting is Friday 2/12 at the Green Cup.

Submitted by John Donaldson

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For the Pleasure of Knowing our Neighbors: Community Potluck Suppers Begin this Month

Starting this month, valley residents are invited to join monthly community potluck suppers for the pleasure of enjoying each other’s company and getting to know neighbors.  “It’s just like the good old days!” says local farmer David Hartshorn.  The suppers will be held at the Waitsfield United Church on Sundays at 6 pm.  This month’s supper will take place on January 24th and subsequent suppers will be held the last Sunday of the month through May.  Bring your family, friends, visitors, and a dish to share.  (Also bring your own place setting to avoid extra trash.  Compostable tableware will be available as well.)  The suppers are sponsored by the Valley Futures Network, a grassroots, citizen effort focusing on building a healthy and sustainable 21st century future for Mad River Valley communities.  For more information contact Jill Arace at jarace@gmavt.net, 496-9974.

Free music will begin at 7:30 provided by the Mad River Valley Music Bank.

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Unless you’ve been living in the wilderness of the rural Vermont frontier, you probably have heard that uber-director James (Titanic and Aliens) Cameron is back with an incredible “game-changing” new film called “Avatar” that has imperial audiences and critics talking. Much has been made, and rightly so, of the movie’s brilliance: the creation of an entirely new language, for example, and the film’s iridescent three-dimensional visuality – a phenomenal spectacle – and well-worth seeing on the big screen. Equally interesting, though, is “Avatar’s” highly critical anti-imperial vision, dismissed by most mainstream critics, like the New Yorker’s David Denby, as little more than echoes of 1960s counter-culture. For anyone considering the United States as Empire, however, “Avatar’s” evocative and disturbing storyline – “Aliens” meets “Dances With Wolves” meets Lord of the Rings” – proves much more damning than not.

The story unfolds like this. Sometime in the future, a young and embittered U.S. ex-marine named Jake Sully (a convincing Sam Worthington) ships out to a remote mining colony called Pandora. Leg-less, Sully finds himself a mercenary working for the Company as a specially trained soldier who inhabits an “avatar,” a genetically hybridized creature designed to build relationships with the natives known as Na’Vi. Sully’s job is to “win hearts and minds,” as the old imperialistic propaganda goes. The Company’s ongoing goal? Profit-maximization through the pursuit of an element called “Unobtanium.” (I can see Cameron smiling.)

Tough-talking scientist Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) heads up the avatar program, and when she isn’t butting heads with the Company brass, she oversees training for Sully, who finds himself separated from his team on his first foray into the jungle. His life saved by a beautiful “barbarian,” he winds up in the hands of “the savages, and soon discovers that this indigenous community is defined by “the bond” – connections between all living things, The tall, lithe, tailed, blue, willowy creatures that Sully impersonates share a deep “hook up” (quite literally) to the stunning natural world of Pandora – cascading waterfalls, craggy chasms and canyons, and a diverse array of fascinating, marvelous (and ferocious) creatures.

The Omaticaya, as the natives call themselves, revere a mystical energetic force called Eywa, an animist Spirit that infuses all living things. “I have come to learn,” says Sully/Avatar to the “hostiles” at his first meeting. “It is hard to teach the Sky People,” one of the Na’Vi leaders responds. “It is hard to fill a vessel that is already full.” Sully soon finds himself torn between his attraction for the Na’Vi and their chief’s beautiful daughter, and his official avatar/marine mission – to convince the Na’Vi to move their village off of one of the largest Unobtanium deposits in the area. His training in “the flow of energy” and “spirits of animals” (”tree hugging crap,” Sully calls it at first) is by turns humorous and breath-takingly beautiful, helped along by the 3D/CGI throw down and the boundless imagination of Cameron and his team.

Most compelling, perhaps, is the oddly deja-vu-like quality of “Avatar.” Thematically, the scenes in the film – helicopter gunships thrashing down onto the green underbrush, muscled military men hoisting gigantic weapons, and the like – are eerie-ly reminiscent of moments from the Vietnam “police action” or dozens of other “theaters” of conflict that defined the 20th century, history’s bloodiest, and are quickly moving to define this next one. In the Age of Twitter, this time writer Wallace Stegner once called “the amputated present,” we are quick to forget our own history of violence against “the natives” and nature itself, and Cameron’s film brings back this history with disturbing three-dimensional vividness. By the time the rock-hard Company commander issues a “preemptive strike against the aboriginal horde” (“We will fight terror with terror,” he snarls) in an attempt to “blow a huge hole in their racial memory,” Cameron makes it clear to the point of cliché what histories he is retelling. When Sully and a small band of rogue Company employees decide to “go native” and mount an organized resistance campaign, it is hard not to stand up, remove the 3D glasses, and cheer.

How “Avatar” plays out I will not reveal here. The ultimate irony, perhaps, for Sully and for us all, is this: as we destroy the real world – beautiful, connected, sacred, organic – the only “place” many of us think we can retreat to is the world of networked electronic technology (Second Life, anyone?), itself a “Cyberia” created by the mining of the planet’s natural yet finite resources.

The ultimate form of Imperialism.

And it takes a Hollywood director to shock us back into our senses.

“All energy is borrowed,” Sully learns from his nubile and gifted young teacher, “and one day you must give it back.”

Bingo.

As we enter the 21st century and “the age of limits,” truer words have not been spoken.

At least not by Hollywood.

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