I read Running Away about two weeks ago and ever since I’ve been thinking about blogging it, but there’s something in me that revolts against writing about this book. It’s short and light and Matthew B. Smith’s translation reads really well… but the narrator is repulsive, a middle-class idiot savant who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He goes to Shanghai to deliver money to a guy called Zhang Xiangzhi, and then indulges in all the usual orientalist fantasies; including misreading menace into acts of friendship in a culture he doesn’t understand. This culminates in him concluding that Xiangzhi is a heroin wholesaler.

The Cupar Arts Festival went head to head with The Frieze Art Fair once again this year, and for me there was no contest in terms of prioritising one over the other. I headed out of London and away from Frieze to Cupar in Fife (Scotland). The main attraction was The Attic Archive on at The Y (Marathon House, Bonnygate, Cupar, Fife KY15 4LG). The Attic is a private space on Dundee’s Union Street that has been an international centre for marginal art collaborations since the early 1970s; the Cupar Arts Festival exhibition provides a rare chance for the general public to get a sense of what’s been going on there all that time.

Yes, those crazy non-erotic soft porn DVDs are invading UK pound shops once again, which led Justin to comment on my Jenna Jameson blog of a few days ago: “Have you noticed that Poundland actually sell porn DVDs?” Well, I blogged about the porno on offer in pound shops back in the days when I was posting on MySpace. Poundland still seem to be concentrating on the more ‘tasteful’ Penthouse and Electric Blue type stuff. Pound shops stuffed with trash DVDs, let alone euro or dollar shops selling anything at all, are in short supply in inner London; but the same shirt turns up at the same prices on market stalls in Whitecross Street and elsewhere (okay, I lied, a lot of these DVDs go for 50p when they turn up down Whitecross Street – never trust a Londoner!

24 Hour Party People (2002) kept coming up in conversations I was having as I wandered around the UK, and so I have finally checked it out, although I am no fan of director Michael Winterbottom. This particular film with its super self-conscious po-mo ersatz drug patter is more like his A Cock & Bull Story(2005) than Wonderland (1999) – and let’s not even get into the puke-inducing television journalist-centred Welcome to Sarajevo (1997), or the pathetic ‘pop cultural’ _9 Song_s (2004). Winterbottom’s 2002 effort focuses on Tony Wilson – a Manchester based television journalist, unsuccessful businessman and would-be hipster. It goes without saying that no matter how Wilson’s PR minions attempted to gloss his life story, it always ended up looking really boring to me.

Those of you with long memories may recall that I wasn’t too thrilled when I got around to watching Jenna Jameson in Zombie Strippers, but now I’ve found a horror film in which the hardcore porn legend doesn’t star but she does really steal the show. Evil Breed (2003) directed by Christian Viel is a train wreck of a movie. It starts with some hetro sex in a tent and a stupid murder, then cuts to the title credits, and during this there is really bad heavy metal playing on the soundtrack. I watched the opening a second time with Yellowman’s Walking Jewellery Store on repeat play on my hi fi, and this massively improved it.