Rear view
— Phil Kay
Our resident stand-up arrives on the back page only to go all lower case on us as he sings the praises of The List, er, the list.
one list. one the list. one. ever being added to. amended. updated. and it swaps coverleaders like the rota cylcers of the velodrome. passionately. the front cover is dead; long live the front cover. no. the list you return to and return to, it must have all the most opened/most re-used/most consulted/most single referrals without browse rate. surely. the list stays as it came; minimal decay. pliable like it is a new kind of pasta. like the way of the baby suede shoe tongue: still fully back-pocket eligible. not some sharp-cornered facade of a GO biting into the glutumus of one hundred and fifty thousand weekend jeans wearers. hidden on the passenger seat of the second car. it warms in your hands: hold one. not with the list the usual guilt of the dry-finger SCreech, of the shame of the others who live one savvy month ahead of us . . . we can trail and we can buy on the twenty-third of september and it says november. three pounds ninety five. people do not hide their list or feel dirty after reading it. it is good here. like at the back of the bus where you can sit in the middle seat with 60 feet of legroom and where my cousin showed her fanny and i remember the feeling i felt, even though i was only eight. that she had lost something then. Anyway. up the back it’s better because you are in the driver's
the new things and films and photos and come back later. i have a wonderful stOry about getting out of a taxi in paris and the
car driving onto my foot and me shouting to the driver. ‘reversez. seriously. reversez.‘ then pulling my foot out of my boot - which had a steel toe cap - and looking at the car resting upon it there. for now. though. you must go back in. for there is always something more to learn from the list.
one lovely thing about the list magazine is that it is uniquely floppy. bravely so; a monument to old-style. roll-and-walk-with journal; so bendy that it is already worn in. so that as soon as you get it. it is softened to you. previously loved yet new. massaged like chamois from the constant loving of trying-like-fuck to ever memorise a single pair of cinema times. and going back to the phone number for king tut’s and starting the backwards flick through from the kids page again. and just double checking that there will never be any jazz in falkirk on a tuesday.
we can never learn cinema times; we have invented something we can never master; they only come to us in a referential plane. we have created a tiny monster yet he does not trouble us. we do not need to learn cinema times. They only exist in a way that is insatiably supplied. avaliable. like feeding and stroking schrodinger‘s cat.
not like other magazines does the list have a cover that is like the surface of a wet painting.
the list does not seem old and out of date by the time you get it home. the list is not one big flick-through and then left to slide heavily around the carpet. face down with the advert of the year smiling at the ceiling.
it does not lie around the house for indeterminate months. like more rigid and more glossy things, to be found again and reviled. no. it has a life and then it dies and it is reborn of the second thursday and we learn to mourn. to grieve and to move throughout the list. for there is
John Fardell
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Save this. don’t read it now, go on. go in and check stuff. check out
my cousin showed her fanny and i remember the feeling i felt, even though i was only eight
big mirror. only small and faceless with a face, and tiny and in a small silver room where perspective is stretched on a rack and it isn’t right. i would like to fit a very large bus mirror in my car and see what it does.
so perhaps read this on the second or third last day of the life of this list. save it for small wednesday and next time perhaps i should just write out the cinema times in verse for so they can be memorised?
so. yeah. wait a while before you read this. sharon.
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120 THE LIST 1—15 Mar 2001
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