This New England

"Binary,'' by Ben Watkins -- oil on inlaid wood.

At AS220 Gallery, in Providence, in June.

XXX

Times have changed.
And we've often rewound the clock
Since the Puritans got a shock
When they landed on Plymouth Rock.
If today
Any rock they should try to stem,
'Stead of landing on Plymouth Rock,
Plymouth Rock would land on them.

Intro to Cole Porter's song "Anything Goes.''

Are the people of Plymouth, Mass., ready for the huge studio complex planned for the town? It's the biggest municipality in Massachusetts in square miles, but...

Plymouth Rock Studios is supposed to employ up to 1,500 construction workers and as many as 2,000 employees during full operation at the $500-million film and television studio complex in the South Shore community.

It's supposed to open next year (!) as the world's most environmentally friendly studio complex. It would have 14 soundstages and a 10-acre back lot, production offices, post-production facilities, a theater, hotel and an amenity village, the developer says. (Oh, no -- I hope not a mall!)

It would presumably compete with -- or bring business to, Plimouth Plantation -- that fascinating but often economically stressed version of a 1620s Plymouth -- complete with some English West Country dialect from time to time by those costumed docents who can pull it off.

If this studio complex actually gets built, and who can predict with precision in these credit-tightened times, it will vastly change the character of Plymouth, which economically was mostly know for tourism and rope-making. Hollywood East! Saltboxes and the stars! What a surreal town Plymouth would become.

This seems an implausible project, but check it out at www.plymouthrockstudios.com The late Henry Hornblower, the Boston Brahmin helped start the modern incarnation of Plimouth Plantation, would be flabbergasted.

In any case, we don't seem to make many physical things, like rope, these days. We make images.

XXX

I have long lauded passenger railroads and the need for a bigger, better Amtrak, especially for southern New England, which, like Western Europe and Japan, is ready made for rail.

I feel even better about Amtrak now.

I had a family member, just released from the hospital, and still ill, who was taken in hand by Amtrak personnel in the churning mass at New York's Pennsylvania Station and put on the right train.

And, in a time of fewer and fewer direct human connections, the person taking the reservation chatted with me about a similar family issue she had. (That is not to dismiss Amtrak's famous electronic voice, "Julie'' -- the best of the disembodied commercial voices we hear these days.)

In a socially cold time, in which typing on screens is rapidly replacing real conversation, and service is imploding, it was a gust of warmth. Alleluia Amtrak!

 Tags  "Julie Amtrak AS220 Ben Watkins Henry Hornblower Plimouth Plantation

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