EXPERIMENTAL Oct 2024 Leftovers

Elliott Flanagan

Elliott Flanagan is an artist, poet and writer exploring contemporary masculinity via psychogeographic dreams and disorienting post-industrial backdrops of exotica and lovesickness. Local landmarks transfigure into divine monuments, fast paced reality blends with fragments of memory and a personal high pop culture. While he has not referred to it directly, this art writing piece by Elliott Flanagan is a reflection on themes of recollection that emerged in Omid Asadi's 'Resonance and Remnants' installation at Castlefield Gallery (15 October 2023 – 21 January 2024). “A few thoughts about the text,” Flanagan suggests: “An unfolding around memory and life and sensation. An exploration of the creative state. Talking about this character's perceptions and bringing to consciousness his involuntary memories. The artist as a youth. Art as saviour and redeemer. A reminder of what's possible beyond your experience.”

He wiped his cherry stained fingertips before leafing again at the foxed pages of his personal history. This happened most evenings and it crowned a day he had lied to his French class about his age and called a colleague a philistine for not appreciating The Beatles. It was mostly nighttime this occurred but not exclusively so. If he was stuck behind another white Kia on his commute or had inadvertently come across another meltdown on Facebook or a Twitter spat, he would drift away and try to count the numerous different times he had vomited due to alcohol consumption. He knew it had happened a lot during his lifetime and reckoned it had knocked five years off his life. Mini deaths he called them. In this new age of puritanism though it was an irresponsible message so he kept his stories to himself.

Bathing in the reflected glory of obtaining his first forklift truck license at the age of eighteen he poured himself a glass. He drinks wine now but it used to be shorts. He couldn’t choose the time or place that revisited him. It just happened. He wanted to be fully immersed in a French port city inside a covered market having just ordered fresh oysters and white wine. The smell of cigarettes in the air. Piles of oranges. Boxes, trays, a pigeon pierces through a sparkling dust cloud from the hard bristles of a stallholder sweeping up. The clack-clack of plates like school dinners and leftovers being scraped. Sporadic explosions of wild laughter, one operatic, another like a machine gun. An old man rises from his stool as an elder would to preach to an assembled crowd. Head bowed with monolithic hands he rearranges the fruit and vegetables on the table in front of him as he quietly listens to the request of his customer.

He desired to revive this moment and live in it unencumbered, and willed the concrete pillars, glass roof and the car park above the market hall into being. Like a time-lapse film of plants sprouting from the earth, he imagined the perfunctory exterior of late twentieth century French civic authority renovation rise up from the floorboards and enclose him inside. His artistic attempt at reproduction could not last though. His heart could not override what was involuntary. Inescapable messages visited him sent in smoke signals from a place out of reach, somewhere in the deepest most remote part of his being. The oysters and wine were a glass slide in a projector, the rows of stalls a home video playback and the locals enjoying a weekend of leisure, tinny audio from a laptop. It was as artificial as plastic flowers. All his dreams took place back in his hometown.

The Mitre was an old pub in the town centre passed down from generation to generation. With its stone flagged floors and open cast iron fireplace it still retained its former lives. It was small and split into three rooms. There were benches but few sat down. It was a drinkers’ place. Stood at the bar no one person or encounter was out of reach. It was all there. On Fridays and Saturdays there was a DJ on. On Sundays regulars in the know would time their visit for the free jukebox in the evening. This particular night was the last Friday before Christmas Eve, known locally as ‘Mad Friday’. The busiest night of the year. Everybody seemed to be out, stood waiting at the bar, sometimes four, five, six people deep. It wasn’t just people his own age either. Mums and dads, aunties and uncles were out, in their collars and frills and pristine shoes, gel in their hair and lipstick on their teeth. A cider for her and a lager for him.

Growing up he liked to draw. He attended art lessons at secondary school, a band of disparate adolescents like a group of mercenaries from the World War II films on television every Christmas. He was good at it and helped his classmates with their work. They swapped VHS videos and CDs. Liam Roscoe, a tough kid from the valleys outside of town who vied for hardest in the school, insisted he take his much sought after copy of Executions. A banned video nasty Roscoe guaranteed was genuine footage, he took it home but didn’t watch it, pretending to enjoy its real-life death reel when returning it under the table a few days later.

Mr Conroy had an imposing frame and a permanent, puffed out chest as most of them did at his school. A renaissance man from a rugby league town. A relic from the sixties. He’d taught your Dad and now he was teaching you. Had it ever been a vocation? If it had been it was a forgotten passion now, a slipped memory of his ideals overtaken by a perfunctory, Monday to Friday discontent. A bitterness that easily rose up in his eyes when his face began to contort with rage. When he shouted he let out a shrill, high pitched sound. All the worst ones seemed to have that in common. Conroy didn’t like the other kids asking their fellow fifteen-year-old to help them instead of asking him.

He felt hard done by and showed it. He hated Conroy’s arrogance, his indifference, his goatee and his lack of a sense of humour unless he was the one coming out on top. The teacher didn’t care what might happen to them, whether they passed or flunked and would regularly say so in long, pacing speeches in front of the class after something displeased him. A loose piece of clay, a projectile. Not a rolled up lump from the various splatters of Blu Tack that spotted the walls but a chunk that’s higher purpose wasn’t meant for the kiln. A hasty full-stop for a bully and a bore, a good shot that would define the rest of his time out of art class in an adjacent room nearby. They didn’t much see each other again after that. He remembered the moment thirteen years later when he was told Conroy had died and his instinct at the news. Shocked at this response, his messenger gave him the opportunity to retract but he was unequivocal. He was glad and said as much.

In the pub he stood at the exterior of a throbbing mass of bodies. It was dark and hot with oscillating coloured beams coming from the corner of the room. Each spotlight provided several perfect circles of light that landed on heads and backs, then stretched and became capsule shaped as they moved from one person to the next. He recognised the double edged atmosphere and knew that within its excess lay a drunken malevolence that could be readily stirred. He watched the intense figures, emotionally charged and contorted, animated by overflowing, fizzy pints and deals on shots. The only air left existed amongst the greasy rooftops overlooking the town. A man from the crowd had been staring and finally moved towards him. The stranger got so close he was readied for him to say something in his ear. You’re not from round here, the man said in a low, threatening voice.

He made it to A-Level study. He scraped through his GCSE results, managing it with little revision and picking up distinct results that were both good and bad. His high marks corresponded with the teachers he got on with, performing well in the subjects he liked and barely turning up for the rest. The careers advisor told him to join the army. He wanted to stay on though and take his place in the common room. He had been a couple of times prior to finishing school, sent by the PE department to post team lineups on the noticeboard. He would stay as long as possible, recognising friend’s siblings and older boys from the football team so he could infiltrate this seductive place. He and his friends had spent most mornings during their remaining year arriving early enough to clinch their spot, standing where the ice cream van used to park at lunch before it was stopped indefinitely as a punishment for bad behaviour. This was their perfect vantage point to admire the 6th Form girls walk by. He had been used to all boys then. To advance to higher education meant girls would be there from the local equivalent all-girls school.

The English Literature classroom was up the stairs and its large pivoting windows were always ajar. At the back of the room these large glass panes overlooked the busy main entrance where staff would stroll in to their next lesson having taught in the secondary school the previous period. From up above, one could feign a loud rendition of a thick amount of phlegm delivered from the back of the throat to fill the mouth, and make an expertly performed spitting sound at the exact time Mr Brennan was directly below. His red, cauliflower ears from the damp and soggy pitches of yesteryear never failed to flap. He always stopped and looked up for a culprit never stupid enough to hang out of the window and get caught admiring his work.

Mr Price taught poetry there. He was a short, difficult man with white hair like feathers, and an intense stare. His stature and features were reminiscent of a great horned owl, his small pursed mouth like a hooked beak to tear up prey. Price hadn’t the air of a former sportsman. He was a real campus man, his flowing yellow scarf and soft brown leather briefcase were Oxford Professor affectations in a spit-and-sawdust school and college of gravel pitches, blocked urinals, lost and found PE kits and chip barms. He was the Head of Sixth Form and there was a common understanding that the rest of the teachers hated him.

In Price’s lesson he did Prufrock. The classroom was arranged in a square and the teacher walked around the outside of the room performing the poem as if treading the boards at The Old Vic. When his voice became thin and dried up, Price would sit down at his desk to pour hot water from his steaming silver flask. Once he felt suitably lubricated, he got up and resumed his journey again having hardly stopped reciting or offering his critical responses. In doing so, little burps would punctuate his speech. This would continue until the room reeked of his stale breath. He was a ridiculous figure but impenetrable. Everyone was wary of him. This preening man of Latin made the poem inaccessible, made you feel stupid. At home he took out his blue textbook with yellow writing on the cover and flicked to the poem. Away from the smell of Price.

A finger pokes at the paisley hanging down from his neck and the tight doorways and low ceilings of The Mitre take shape again. With a deliberate, slow blink he looks beside him to take another swig from his glass but it’s empty. 1% battery. It was getting too late to talk. He groans as he gets up to move to the kitchen. He lifts the bottle and inspects how much is left. He decides to leave the rest for another day and drifts towards the window. The light behind the advert in the bus shelter flickers on and off, illuminating then scrubbing out a man on a beach in swimming trunks with an inflatable rubber ring around his waist. His diminishing phone musters itself to light up on the windowsill between his bent elbows. He stares at the name.

Hello… Hello?” The screen is blank. He sees his reflection in it and smiles as if seeing someone he recognises at the supermarket. From the fourth floor he watches the busy stretch of road lay dormant apart from Uber drivers. He is going to plug his phone in but not yet. Something is going to happen and he doesn’t want to miss it.