YACK on: Gilliam-esque
Grant Sanders
This Monday evening, I paid a visit to the Planning Board meeting at the Two Fairgrounds Road facility which, a few years back, was the Nantucket Electric building. For those of you who have never been to a Planning Board meeting, and if you're looking for something to do on a slow Monday evening, I recommend it. As far as Governtainment™ is concerned, I give it four out of five stars. It could not be any more entertaining if it were directed by a top Hollywood luminary. In fact, the Planning Board meetings at Two Fairground Road remind me of one Hollywood director's work in particular: Terry Gilliam.

For those who are not familiar with the work of Terry Gilliam, here's a rundown of his credits. He is a former Monty Python's Flying Circus member (the one who did the clever little film bits with clip art and stop-motion animation) and the only American in the group. After directing a few Monty Python movies, he started directing his own films, starting with a great film, Time Bandits in 1981, and then onto his masterpiece, Brazil, and then a string of wonderful films: The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys (which is my favorite Gilliam film) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. His last two films, The Brothers Grimm and Tideland were ambitious achievements that, sadly were very hard to sit through, perhaps because both films, while showing flashes of brilliance, needed a good re-write and lots and lots of editing.

The common thread through nearly all of Gilliam's work: each film creates some kind of surreal or imagined alternate reality. An absurd, offkilter, twisted world that many were not aware existed. And I have to tell you, nothing is more surreal, absurd, off-kilter and twisted as a Nantucket Planning Board meeting.

Maybe it's the setting that helps make the Planning Board meetings so Gilliam-esque. Two Fairgrounds Road is a building which the town took possession of when it bought the 19 acres on the corner of Fairgrounds and Old South Road from the electric company. The front half of the building consists of kitschy mid 1960s wood-paneled offices and conference rooms. It's like stepping back in time when computers were the size of a panel truck and men wore white shirts with skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses. The back of the building is where things get even more like a Gilliam film. As you walk from the front to the back, you pass a panel of big breaker switches. One assumes that these massive switches once controlled the power going to the Nantucket homes. (I wonder, when I look at them, if they are still connected to the grid and if throwing them might send the whole island into darkness.) A few steps along and one comes to the large, open space where the Planning Board meetings are held. There is a concrete slab floor here with markings spray-painted randomly on it. There are massive garage doors. There are old filing cabinets, pushed against the walls. Cheap metal-legged chairs are arranged in uneven rows before the board. The room is lit harshly by long fluorescent tubes mounted on the ceiling of a storage platform above the Planning Board's heads. This lighting scheme provides and irritating light nearly everywhere except where it is needed most for reading or viewing plans. The feeling is somewhat post-apocalyptic, post-industrial, post-Soviet, grey-steel-post-andbeam.

This is a space in which no sane person would choose to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary, and yet, there were close to 50 people huddled here before the Board for hours. Driven here, mostly, by money.

On this particular Monday, there was a good amount of business to be heard and there were perhaps half the number of chairs needed to accommodate all in attendance, so many people were forced to stand or sit on filing cabinets or large cardboard file boxes. As I stood there waiting for people to leave so I could take their chair, a rather large spider lowered itself from the ceiling about five feet in front of my face and then ascended again. It reminded my of a scene in the Terry Gilliam movie, 12 Monkeys, where the Bruce Willis character captures a spider for study. And then, as I looked upon the board of five members at the head table, bathed in a blue-green tinge of fluorescence, I could not help but be reminded of the bureaucrats in the movie, Brazil. Or the panel of leaders of the underground movement in 12 Monkeys (all the Planning Board needed were the clear plastic ponchos and goggles). Or the band of dwarves in the movie, Time Bandits, in which the diminutive workers who were charged by God to keep the universe in order, instead steal the Map of Time and Space and use it to make themselves fabulously wealthy.

The other characters in the room were equally interesting. On this evening, you could not swing a cat without hitting a lawyer. Some speaking before the board, some waiting their turn. Some with portable easels and maps mounted on foam-core. Each wearing a jacket and tie or other business-appropriate attire, waiting their turn to stand before the board, and represent their clients, speaking into a squealing microphone amid the grey dusty steel girders of this dim warehouse - looking about as at home in this setting as an alpaca in the middle of Times Square. The absurdity of it was classic Gilliam.

There is drama in this scene, too - well scripted bits spoken by members in the audience asking the board to consider a course of action that seems completely reasonable and rational and in keeping with the values of this island. To which a board member or two reply, "No, we cannot do that. That's not even possible."

While everyone in the room knows that it is.

As I said, for a Monday evening, you can't beat a Planning Board meeting for sheer entertainment, but, I must also add, that it is still a work in progress. I left the meeting well before the end, mostly because the business before the board that I wanted to hear had passed and also because, like Terry Gilliam's last two films, I felt this particular Planning Board meeting, while showing flashes of brilliance, needed a good rewrite and lots and lots of editing.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com and perhaps in a few weeks he will get to review and NP&EDC meeting too. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent. Or his wife.