My Increasingly Implausible Adventures: Post-its. Also Music and Moorcock

On Monday, as you may have seen in the papers, I went to Stationery Club (although obviously the paper is incorrect in its assertion that I was drinking beer. As ever, it's left to the bloggers to correct Old Media's mistakes). I'm not even that fussed about Post-its, really. But a live videochat with one of the inventors? That's a big deal. There was one point I'd have liked to raise, but I didn't really formulate it properly. Still haven't, in fact. But it goes something like this: there was a Spider-Man story years back, addressing the issue of why someone who could concoct that web fluid without proper lab facilities should be working hand-to-mouth as a photographer when he was clearly a brilliant chemist. So Peter Parker goes into a chemical company and they say, sorry, there's no market use for an incredibly strong adhesive which disappears without trace after an hour. Now, that's self-evidently nonsense, but even if it weren't, the example of Post-its - a use being sought out for a very poor adhesive, creating a product which, if unnecessary, is very lucrative - would disprove it. I suppose I was simply interested in whether Geoff Nicholson was aware of that. Instead, I just ended up with Post-its on my face, my pint and (in one weak visual pun) a heart on my sleeve.

Tuesday: the debut Proper London show by Bevan 17 or, as they're ludicrously claiming to be called in what is obviously a sop to steve586's rampant ego, If.... The fourth full stop there was to end the sentence, I'm not sure whether that's correct form in such cases or not. Normal practice on liking a band is to compare them to other bands one likes - and I suppose there is a little One More Grain in there, not that I have any reason to believe any of Bevan 17 have heard One More Grain, few enough people did. But mainly I am reminded of bands I don't quite like, fixed. I always thought the Fall might be quite good if they weren't fronted by a bus station tramp; here it's exliontamer instead, who is eminently presentable and well-spoken. Or Stereolab - I like 'French Disko', but otherwise found them just a bit too Gallic and inert. If they weren't, they might have ended up somewhere near here. They cover John Cooper Clarke with a Scott Walker intro, and get away with it. They come up with the second riff on PIL's "anger is an energy" that I've heard in one afternoon, and even though I really like Pagan Wanderer Lu, Bevan 17's is better.

And last night I played a frankly shambolic game of 40K, but the less said about that the better. So instead I should probably record how much I loved Michael Moorcock's Gloriana, or the Unfullfil'd Queen, a dialogue with Spenser that anticipates Camille Paglia's thoughts on Spenser as precursor to de Sade. I knew Moorcock and Angela Carter had something of a mutual appreciation society going, love across the genre barricades, but even given the pantomime matriarch Ma Cornelius, this is the first time I've read a Moorcock book which I can imagine Angela Carter writing - "the palace glares with a thousand colours in the sunlight, shimmers constantly in the moonlight, its walls appearing to undulate, its roofs to rise and fall like a glamorous tide, its towers and minarets lifting like the masts and hulks of sinking ships". Not that I don't love his outright fantasy and SF, but this would be a great introduction for those more sceptical of such things. So long as they don't mind a fair amount of rather abtruse filth along the way.