I’m thinking about this from the perspective of somebody who has just had a “landmark” birthday – another two days (fingers crossed) and I’ll have outlived my dad – and is therefore a little bit more mindful of the notion of time running out, or at least there being only so much time (though that can in itself reveal itself to be infinite), than I was when I turned forty. So I do feel it’s time to get moving and actually do something that I might be “remembered” by, and that doesn’t just (or at all?) mean my number one albums as secret Arcades/reconfigure humanity project.

ILx has, I think, gone down much the same road as the NME (and maybe Wire) has done, in that every generation thinks its ILx/NME/Wire was the best. It means something else now to (largely) an entirely different assemblage of people – I poke my nose in there every now and then, but otherwise am content to stand well back – so I don’t necessarily know enough to know whether its now urgency is appreciably different in nature or speed from what you, I and others did there a decade plus ago.

(and yes on my part there was the added, aggrieved urgency arising from the fact that I was mainly trying to save a – meaning my – life…)

But yes, something should be done, and yes, we’ll probably have to club together and do it, and no, I don’t know how, and yes, if I’m going to be part of this then L has to be part of it too – I now come as half of a double act, just as before ILx and everything else there was another double act, with another L – because our common mission is really not that far away from what you are proposing.

and yes, we need to think together (while remembering that sometimes the most fruitful stuff comes from people thinking as polar opposites, or in parallel – Max H AND Ben W) and put together – something colourful, something that’s going to be unmissable, even with the largest darts, something non-yelpy clickbait provocative, i.e. writing and thinking that will provoke in terms of inspiring people and maybe helping music and art change their ways and present something new to the world in return.

And it needs to be joyful. Joyful Noises Of The Punctum. But not a BS Johnson blackboard lecture (I like to think of myself as having a vital bit more fight in me than either BSJ or my dad had). More like Esthetix of old but opening up the roof in the hope of not letting in more rain.

what’s the role of pleasure here?

it often strikes me how joyless ilm has become (and makes me, and which is a condition i contribute to), since its older generosity and curiosity and the surprise of all its accidental encounters got old or wore off or whatever.

it seems like a big part of that joy came from thinking together (about the stuff, about ourselves, about people in general). which is maybe why you come back to the idea of a space for re-cultivating that joy, from those kinds of encounters? because it’s hard to see that the other kinds of opportunities/occasions for thinking-in-writing that persist out there are all that favorable to CO-thinking, which was maybe something that was still / seemed to be fostered via the institution of a proper magazine, edited with vision, somehow in touch with an imagineable audience, etc. (thus the idea: A MAGAZINE. i never edited one, but still i have the same bonkers fantasy from time to time: ‘i think it could really work, if i just put together the right kind of journal, imagine it’.)