<![CDATA[The JohnBleasdale Universe

<![CDATA[The JohnBleasdale Universe - Blog]]>Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:30:03 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[New Terrence Malick Interview]]>Tue, 27 Sep 2022 13:54:38 GMThttps://www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/new-terrence-malick-interview

Terrence Malick In conversation with Joseph Gelmis Recorded circa. 1974 Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis planned to write an interview piece to follow his review of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, which was published in Newsday on March 25, 1974, but that never happened, and this material is presented here for the first time. (The film is also mentioned in Gelmis’ overview of the 1973 New York Film Festival [September 13, 1973]: “The advance word from those who’ve seen it is that Malick’s study of loneliness and suppressed rage in a South Dakota hamlet in the 1950s is powerful stuff.”) Questions and comments from Gelmis, who was sometimes too far from the tape recorder to be audible, have been edited for clarity. Malick’s contributions are, as much as possible, given technical limitations of the recording, verbatim. A female voice (D) can be heard throughout. This is Deborah Dobski, who married Gelmis in 1973, and between 1972 and 1979 was an assistant professor in the film department of Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts. The recording suggests that the three are in a hotel room – probably Malick’s, who at one point orders room service on the phone. This archival material is important, not least because the number of published interviews with the intensely private Malick about Badlands can be counted on one hand – and he hasn’t spoken much publicly since then. (Malick, moreover, appears to have embargoed transcripts of his AFI seminars, some of which detail the production of Badlands.) Friendly, voluble, polite, laughing throughout, clearly at ease in Gelmis and Dobski’s company, Malick sheds light on many things in this 15,000-word transcript, which may be the most forthcoming interview we will ever get from him. He talks about the tensions that creative freedoms offer, the production intricacies of Badlands, being part of a new wave of Hollywood filmmakers, his discomfort at talking about his own films, his time at the American Film Institute, and his admiration for Elia Kazan’s America America and Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. We’re lucky to have this valuable material. Gelmis (on contract to Newsday when he conducted this conversation) retained very few of his interview recordings from this period, generally re-using his tapes after pulling what he needed from them. He offers this document (transcribed by Paul Cronin, 9/22) strictly for non-commercial use. [CLICK On the file below for the full transcript]

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]]><![CDATA[Fragmented Souls]]>Mon, 29 Mar 2021 08:48:38 GMThttps://www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/fragmented-souls

An Interview with a Young Woman About Her Life as an African Italian and Her Heritage
by
Fabio Soncin

Marie is a 25-year-old girl with a passion for shapeshifting: sometimes she covers her natural short afro hair with a colourful headscarf, sometimes she applies long braids she wears in different ways. She loves wearing old-school jeans and simple t-shirts and in the last few years she started exploring African fashion by wearing colourful shirts with typical African patterns. Not only is she capable of using different styles, but she also manages to change her attitude towards people in order to adjust to any kind of social situation.

Marie represents the generation of people who migrated to Italy in the ‘90s with their families and was brought up here.
She arrived in Italy with her parents from Rwanda in 1996, when she was only six months old – “probably the best period for African refugees to come to Italy”, she says. Her parents left Rwanda in 1994 to escape the Rwandan genocide and stayed in a refugee camp in the Congo (where she was born) for a year before leaving for Italy to stay with an uncle, who at the time was studying at the University of Padua.
As a kid, she received a special upbringing from her parents, both because they transmitted part of their culture to her and also because they found themselves in the situation of being immigrants in a country like Italy. She has always been told to pay more attention than other kids to her behaviour – “You will always be judged differently”, her father used to tell her. In such a context she quickly learned to adjust her look and attitude to different situations. Her particular situation had a peculiar impact on her inner self, stuck between her Rwandan heritage and the country she grew up in. Marie’s perception of reality is different from both that of her parents and that of white people of her age, a unique transversal sub-culture in which she often struggles to define her concept of ‘home’.
I got the chance to meet her and asked her a few questions about her experience as a young woman with a Rwandan heritage living in north-eastern Italy.

Can you describe your perception about how Italian (or Venetian) people’s attitude towards black people has changed through years according to your own experience?
Marie: “I think it got worse. I arrived here when I was six months old and I have always experienced racism, even in elementary school, but racist people to me were a minority, I always felt as if I had a whole other group of people I could turn to. I grew up in a small town and I never felt like too much of an outsider, I never felt I was discriminated too much. I’ve always felt that I could fit in. Throughout all my life I’ve always felt I was something else, but it’s mainly due to the fact that maybe I grew up as a black girl with all white friends.
Whereas when I turned 17 or 18 years old the whole political scene changed, and the right-wing parties started gaining more and more popularity. When I used to see Bossi I couldn’t take him seriously, I used to laugh, but when Salvini came, it was a turning point for me and many people that I know. It was as if Italians felt entitled to show their true colours, so to say. Before, if someone would say something to you on the street, the tram, or the bus,there would be someone who’d answer them and have your back, whereas afterwards I felt that more and more people began to be disrespectful. When I go out, I always feel attacked in some way or another, it’s either the bus driver who refuses to answer your questions even though the person before you had something to ask and got an answer.
When I go out with my white friends, this never happens, but when I’m out with my black friends it’s different. It would happen for example in a restaurant that people would annoy us or be mean to us. When I’m out with my white friends I feel that people look at me in a different way and treat me with respect. It seems as if they were reassured by the fact that I’m out with white friends, they’re willing to treat me respectfully just because I’m surrounded by Italian people, as if that means that I’m well integrated. Sometimes I think that they wouldn’t dare to say anything to me just because then my white friends would say something back. Usually when people are disrespectful to me,they never dare to say something to my face, it always happens for example when they are in a car and yell something out of the window. They don’t have the courage to say anything to my face and let me reply.
Sometimes I don’t feel comfortable going to new places alone, I would ask a friend to come with me first. Once I went into a bar with a black friend of mine and I noticed that as soon as we got in the atmosphere got weird. We discovered later that that place was a popular bar for Forza Nuova (a neo-fascist party -JB) supporters. I know my safe spots I can go to, but there are places I prefer to avoid.”

Culturally speaking, what kind of aspects were the hardest to compromise with for your family?
Marie: “My parents were lucky, they arrived in the best time an immigrant could arrive in Italy. In the ‘90s there wasn’t a big wave of immigrants from Africa, so people would approach them with curiosity. Luckily, my uncle was studying in Padua, he had been living here for many years, so he got a place for us to stay and introduced us to many people here. Our integration happened quite easily. But I have to say that we’ve always had this feeling that in Italy you can be integrated only if you kind of forget about your background in front of other people. We’re allowed to be Rwandan only in a very private way. You must fit into the image of an Italian person as much as possible. We’ve been lucky because my parents are Christian and Catholic, so that was never an issue, but I have a lot of friends from Morocco and Tunisia and they had a different experience. They were sometimes treated as outcasts and the only ones who were not treated so were those who would dress in a western way. I remember that my mum has never worn African clothing too much, only in specific occasions, mostly with other African people.
Luckily, they didn’t have to compromise a lot, they were quite lucky, but integration in Italy means that you have to act like an Italian. Appreciating Italian culture and speaking Italian well is not enough, you’re requested to resemble an Italian in every aspect in order to be recognised as a well-integrated immigrant.
When I started to embrace my African identity, which happened quite late, I felt that it got much more difficult for me to connect and interact with new people, whereas before it was never the case”.

Do you ever feel that you and your friends have different perceptions of reality? How?
Marie: “Yes, definitely. Our background shapes our perceptions. Even within my group of friends there are people who have very different backgrounds, but one thing that I know is that I’ve always felt there was no place I could really call ‘home’, even though I had a really nice childhood and grew up in a nice family.
This is a big difference between me and my parents too, they consider Rwanda their home, their identity is there, my white friends grew up in Italy and feel Italian, whereas I feel torn between hundreds of sides, I feel like a hybrid. Right now it’s not something that hurts me, it’s just the way it is, but it was hard to come to term with these multilateral parts of me. I’ve always felt much more attached to the people I love rather than the place itself. I consider Italy important to me because my friends and family live here, but I don’t consider the place itself as my home. With Rwanda it’s even worse, my parents didn’t teach me the language, I was supposed to visit it for the first time last year but then then the epidemic started spreading so we had to postpone our visit”.

Do you and your parents share the exact same culture in terms of values?
Marie: “We have way different values, especially my dad. My mum finished her studies here in Italy, education plays a huge role in shaping one’s mindset. She got a bachelor’s degree in social assistance in Ca’ Foscari, the same thing she studied in Rwanda, but the completely different environment shaped her mentality much more than my dad’s. She understands concepts like feminism or sexual identity even though she was not accustomed to it before, whereas with my dad it’s harder, because despite him being very smart he still finds it more difficult than my mum to understand certain things. He studied a lot of European literature, he used to be a French linguistics professor, so I expected from him more openness. He has a strict Rwandan perception of family roles, for example. In Rwandan culture women are the centre of the structure of the family and because of this they have many responsibilities, especially in educating children. If a kid is well behaved it’s because the mother taught him well, if the kid misbehaves it’s the mother’s fault. In his mind this is just the way it is, sometimes it’s difficult for him to understand the different structure of the European family. The very same thing happens when I meet other Rwandan relatives: it might happen that we get invited somewhere, but even if we are the guests, women are expected to cook. This is just the way it is for them”.

How have your parents transmitted their culture to you and your sister?
Marie: “They gave me a lot especially through music. When I think about Rwanda the first thing that comes to my mind is music. They would always play Rwandan music and try to teach us [Marie and her sister] Rwandan traditional dances. Even food is really important, at home we eat much more African and Rwandan food rather than Italian dishes. One thing that has always been really important for my parents is respect for authority. Rwandan people are considered to be really quiet and observant of the rules, so as a kid they always told me to me observant of the rules both outside the family and inside. I remember when I was five that I would try to be loud with other kids in the church choir, but I would see my dad from afar looking at me and I would immediately stop. Everyone would compliment my parents because me and my sister were so well behaved. This is also because they were immigrants here. They would always say to us: “When you behave in a bad way, you are going to be more scrutinised than your friends”. They had to come to terms with the reality of their social position.”

How would you describe your relationship with black and white people of your parents’ age?
Marie : “I would say that in some ways I don’t relate and I do relate with both groups for different reasons. When I talk with my friends’ parents, it’s because I’ve learned how to adapt to any kind of situation, I’ve also learned dialect. I’ve learned how to talk, what topics I can talk about, but it’s never a completely free conversation, so to say. It’s a sort of ‘survival mode’ I had to learn to use. I constantly switch from being sick of it and being even proud of this sort of elasticity. Sometimes it happens that I think about how my life would have been if my family had stayed in Rwanda, but then I realize that I wouldn’t have met the people I met in my life, I wouldn’t have had the experiences I had, and most importantly I wouldn’t be the person I am today. I’m fine with what I have accomplished and the person I am. At the same time, I’m sick of having to compromise with situations I don’t want to compromise with. I would just like to be loud and clear, but I can’t do that because some people might not understand, I always have to avoid certain topics. Sometimes I know that it’s completely useless to have certain conversations. There are situations in which I would like to address someone’s racist comment, but I usually prefer not to. I even got accustomed to people that I know making racist comments about the migrant situation as if I wasn’t in the room. I know when any attempt to establish a dialogue and explain my reasons it’s going to be fruitless.
This social adaptability is exhausting in many ways, but it is an important part of me, it helps me to communicate with many different kinds of people. It helped me to be more empathetic and open to what other people want to say.”

]]><![CDATA[Diamond Dogs]]>Mon, 08 Feb 2021 09:09:25 GMThttps://www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/diamond-dogs

Diamond Dogs was an album I first heard, I think via Ashley Rose, one of those guardian angels of music who come into your life and show you what you should be listening to. He was never snobbish and had the broadest as well as the deepest taste of anyone I've ever known. He was very into Bowie. Diamond Dogs is the White Album to Ziggy Stardust's Sgt. Pepper. A concept album that lost its concept; a soundtrack for a musical not made. It froths with George Orwell cut up with William S. Burroughs, riven through with a Queerness and ambivalence.

The original idea was to make a musical of 1984 which gave the album its disco-driven song of that title, as well as Big Brother - that booming bass slide is my favourite moment in the whole album - and We Are the Dead. But the opening sets up an altogether less austere and more grimy dystopia. There's some Huxley in here as well. The Sweet Thing Suite is the closest rock opera ever got to being good. It's amazing stuff, with Bowie displaying his full range as a vocalist.

The more cod rock n roll comes as a genuine relief. At last something clear and straightforward, but then is it? Rebel Rebel is a call to arms but also an ironic undercutting of rebellion that so quickly becomes consumerism. And that circular riff. Where are we actually going? The irony is even heavier in the title track of the album, with its almost parodic cowbell (Christopher Walken can be heard saying 'I need that cowbell baby') and its preceding declaration: 'This ain't Rock n Roll, this is genocide!'

I read a comment that this is the Bowiest of Bowie albums and it certainly sits centrally to my personal discovery of Bowie. I went from Diamond Dogs back to Ziggy and forward to Station to Station and then filling in all the gaps in-between. It also meant that I was fully primed when Bowie had a resurgence in the 90s with Outside, an album which felt almost miraculous considering how many had given him up for dead.

In the age of Spotify and streaming, it's good to sit down and reclaim these albums one at a time if necessary.

]]><![CDATA[Books 2020]]>Wed, 23 Dec 2020 09:55:47 GMThttps://www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/books-2020

I tend to read a lot. At least a hundred books a year. I sometimes worry that this quantity of reading is beginning to water down the actual experience of reading. But I tend to overthink things so I shouldn’t worry too much. Also, from a habit born of study I tend to read according to some kind of unofficial syllabus. I hit a topic or an author and go through them as thoroughly as I can or until I hit something else and head off in another direction. One last thing to consider going into this is I’ve now become thoroughly addicted to audio books via Audible (this is not a promotional post). This has a tendency to swerve me towards books which have good narrators, especially memoirs. It also affords me the opportunity to ‘reread’ books, something I usually do only rarely.

So, let’s start with some rereads. I’ve gone through The Lord of the Rings for what must now be in double figures. I’ve always had a love-love-love hate relationship with Tolkien. I can’t quite get over his silliness. In LOTR that’s not such a big deal, because there’s plenty of humour in the books, but in The Silmarillion, which I read for only the second time, boy, does that become turgid. Like doing an exam in Esperanto. But going back in time and being transported to a wholly different universe was a huge comfort in 2020, as was my returning to PG Wodehouse and the Maturin/Aubrey books by Patrick O’Brian. This is comfort food for the eyes, but what can be nicer than comfort food when you really, but really need it? My annual reread of Wuthering Heights offered sterner stuff and the wind off the moors. Every time I read this, I come to the conclusion there is no more popularly misunderstood classic. It is not a love story and Heathcliff is not a romantic hero. It’s a hate story and Heathcliff is a rapist.
I already knew Toni Morrison’s work from Beloved, but I made a determined effort to go a little deeper. I read Sulla, Song of Solomon, A Pair of Blue Eyes and God Bless the Child. The latter was the weakest of the bunch, but throughout her writing she has the tensile strength of a sentence of a Nabokov. Her storytelling is at once elusive and thoroughly absorbing. She has become someone I will quite happily pursue. JM Coetzee is a fellow Nobel winner who I endeavoured to know better. Summerland is like a mirror we had in the bathroom. It was actually a cabinet with three mirrors that served as doors. You could put your face in the middle mirror and open the other two into a triangle with your face as the apex. The infinity of complex self-absorption is precisely the same effect. It bit more straightforwardly if a little duller was The Master of St Petersburg where Dostoyevsky stands in less convincingly for Coetzee.
I read a lot of film books this year. Baby, I Don’t Care by Lee Server gave me the juice on Robert Mitchum and offered me the excuse to go through his filmography a bit deeper. A biography of Burt Lancaster and Oliver Reed and autobiographies by Ken Russell – excellent – Woody Allen – shit – Debbie Harry and Matthew McConaughey – entertaining but daft – all added something to my knowledge but with dollops of self-justification that makes you constantly have to adjust. Oliver Stone was by far the most interesting memoir I read this year, perhaps because with his experiences in Vietnam, he’s led a more interesting life. Rather than then we made this film/record, then we made this other film/record. All successful lives have the same trajectory, so the voice is really important. The most imaginative film book I read was Sean Hogan’s England’s Screaming, a take on David Thompson’s Suspects. Basically, an anthology of short stories in which all the characters come from British horror movies and live in the same ‘universe’. It’s enormous fun, but you will probably want to skip the stories which are based on films you haven’t seen.
New novels were fairly light on the ground this year. Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind amused and irritated me in almost equal measure. It’s the kind of novel a famous person is allowed to write because no editor dare say, you’re flailing here, you need to cut this piece etc. Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner tells the story of an American poet living in Spain and learning the language and trying to fit in, but always staying a bit out of it. It’s funny and beautifully put down, and it’s short. Wells Tower’s short story collection Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is nigh on perfect. Every short story invents its own world and its own voice. The only quibble is the final story which feels like he’s letting his hair down.
Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad – his just published prequel to Life and Fate – is stunning. One of the most profound reading experiences of 2020. There are more moments which are written for the censor which need to be picked out, but on the whole the epic scale of the storytelling and the insights on human psychology make the comparisons to Tolstoy utterly justified. Another new to me novel was Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor which gives a fictional portrait of Bram Stoker and his friendship and professional partnership with Henry Irving and the actress Alice Terry. It’s a profoundly moving piece of working.
I read deeply in nonfiction. Politics – especially Trump – history and popular science have all been looked at. I particularly enjoyed Lisa Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made, which posits that emotions are a culturally constructed description of a wide variety of internal physical sensations, rather than elemental things which reside in certain parts of the brain or have a certain fingerprint. Barack Obama’s Promised Land was perhaps my favourite non-fiction book of the year. Just so well written, thoughtful, perceptive, and humorous, it also served as an antidote to the stupidity playing out on our TV screens. Obama was by no means a perfect president and he’s fully aware of his own limitations, but I’d rather have a centrist than a moron with a flamethrower.

]]><![CDATA[Cannes 2019]]>Mon, 27 May 2019 07:43:37 GMThttps://www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/cannes-2019

My 8th Cannes Film Festival was a blast. Met up with some great friends - now old friends I guess - saw a slate of phenomenal movies, interviewed some interesting artists and wrote a lot. This post is just a way of putting it all in one place.

Here is my final wrap post for Cine-Vue. There are links throughout this post. So my favourite films of the festival were the winner Parasite which I reviewed along with nine other movies for Cine-Vue:

The Lighthouse
The Climb
Little Joe
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Frankie
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Sibyl
Sorry We Missed You
Dead Don't Die

I wrote five pieces for Sight and Sound:

The Unknown Saint
The Orphanage
Red 11
The Traitor
Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
I also contributed to a prediction piece which for the second year running I guessed right.

I also wrote two reviews for HotCorn:Rocketman andOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood (because it's that good).

I wrote about Terence Malick's latest A Hidden Life for Filmuforia. As well as the wonderfulDeerskin.

Multimedia section I appeared on Turkish TV talking about the festival prior to the opening and chatter with critic and pal Paolo Portugal. And was a guest on the official Cannes Festival radio, presented by Jason Solomons. All of which are available below.
This is my Letterboxd list of films watched.

]]><![CDATA[The Invasion of Sally Bowers]]>Sun, 13 Jan 2019 13:03:12 GMThttps://www.johnbleasdale.com/blog/the-invasion-of-sally-bowers

Day 1.
Georgie was brushing his mouth stones and I came in breezily and sat on the shit seat. ‘What are you doing?’ he said, glaring at me in the mirror.
‘Food outing,’ I told him.
‘Can’t you wait?’
‘Er,’ I said. ‘Yes, I suppose.’
I would have to be careful. I had made a mistake and the day was a mere four minutes and fifty-two seconds old.

I went back to sleep room and stood in the corner immobile until I heard Georgie leave tiled place. ‘It’s free,’ he shouted as he plodded across interim space to the football poster gallery. I’d been prepared for food outing by observation, but it was the oddest feeling having a bit of your inside squeeze out and plop into waiting blue water below. I pressed the button and the seat throat swallowed it with much saliva-ing.
Downstairs, food inning was happening.
‘There’s your tea love,’ Derek, my cocksman, said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. I was shook by my earlier mistake. Five of those and I’d have to exterminate the family and as that was against protocol 17, I really wanted to avoid that. Who knows maybe I’d be exterminated. Sooner or later someone was going to get exterminated: that is the only certainty in this garbled mass of information reception we call reality. To avoid questioning and examination, I turned the television on and stared at the sofa people discussing garbled chaos.
‘You see if people had known all this before the referendum it would have been totally different,’ Derek said.
Georgie came in, drying his head strands with an orange cloth. ‘Buyer’s remorse, huh dad?’
‘I honestly thought it’d be funnier than this,’ he said, mouth turned down to indicate despair.
The tea tasted like dried leaves boiled in water and then garnished with cow tit juice. I add sweet sand to alter the taste. Georgie half burnt white fungal growth. Georgie left first to his education house and then Derek inquired ‘Are you all right, Sally?’ – I pursed my lips and sent eye water out which seemed to appease him – before he headed off to the selling people things they don’t want place.
In the tile room, I doused myself and then exchanged sleep garments for day garments. I used my phone to connect to the BOSON.
How’s it going?
Really tough. I’m in but they are weird. I’m not happy with the translation program.
Okay, what about your host?
She’s okay. I can feel her thoughts beneath. Can’t we just wipe it?
No. Then we’d wipe everything and then where would you be.
I see what you mean.
Do you want to be exterminated?
No, thank you.
I could hear Sally, gabbling away in the background. Her thoughts were the panicked foolery of poorly informed fear. But I needed her because every now and then I needed a cue like who to recognize and what to do next. Connecting to her long-term memory I realized I was going to be late for money time. I walked to the underground train tunnel and rode with the library people in the sway cylinder. Food smell wafted on the street and the sun was about 14 minutes away and the planet was tilted on its axis so the northern hemisphere was getting closer and so it was medium warm.
‘Hi Sally,’ Brian on the desk said as he buzzed me into the building with a painful erection.
‘Hi Bri,’ I said, using name chop for friendliness.
I went through corridor maze until I found my sit-down space. ‘You’re pushing it this morning,’ Ali – total bitch – said, handing me half pint of coffee and cow tit juice. The computer blinked in front of me and Ali goes through my day schedule. It seemed full. I’ll have to be drinking deeply from Sally’s bucket of life knowledge. ‘And you’ve got the Prime Minister at four.’
I briefly revised Prime Minister in Random Access Memory and let out a mild taboo excretion.
‘Fuck indeed,’ Ali agreed. ‘That’s why I thought you’d be in early. You know she’s going to want the immigration figures. Ironically, the reason we don’t have them is she was such a shit arse when it came to her doing her job as Home Secretary.’
‘Don’t talk like that about Democracy!’ I snapped.
Ali laughed; and gun shot me to death with her fingers. I felt an intense urge to bite through her throat until her head fell off and her inside wetness splashed all over. Luckily, she left the room and I was left to work in peace. There would be meetings. I began to wonder at my choice of Sally. I had wanted someone who was brain fast and full of information taint, but this work time was going to be enhanced difficult. Using the primitive computer phones advertising trivia system supplemented with paper splattered with ink I soon gathered the basic information needed to complete my tasks. I used a basic statistical model to breakdown a detailed survey of the entire population of the area, split into political definitions and age, work status, likelihood of criminality, fertility rate and then projected the whole thing into he future by five solar year increments. I transferred all this from my head bucket and poured it into the electric basket of the computer and then printed it out. It was challenging because I had to use the number language and thinking techniques that I hadn’t used since I was in first education house all those TDSs ago. It took 43 minutes.
Brian came in and closed the door behind him. He smiled. I smiled back. He unzipped his trousers and took out his squirter. ‘You’re not my cocksman,’ I said.
‘What?’ he said.
Sally was trying to scream help or plead via eye signals which was irritating but ineffective. Then I realized that Brian was a secondary illicit cocksman, used to satisfy daytime thrusting urges, something Derek seemed less and less interested in, what with him always watching the kick ball matches and being so tired from selling things people don’t want to people, which admittedly – even at a cursory glance – was not an easy thing to accomplish.
The angle of declination had increased. ‘It’s drooping earthward,’ I said.
‘Sally!’ Brian exclaimed, abashed. ‘I thought…’
I didn’t feel I could reject Brian outright as he obviously thought this was the norm and I could feel a disequilibrium in his feelings, but at the same time, I felt I needed every moment I had to successfully learn Sally’s function and accomplish it without detection of substitution. I calculated by eye and then put forth my finger combine and manipulated as efficiently as I could.
Five seconds and ‘Jesus Christ!’ Brian shouted, ejaculate going everywhere. ‘How did the…? What…?’
‘Read it on the internet,’ I said. It was a ‘go to’ phrase, along with ‘I have a blinding headache’ and ‘sorry, I was a little drunk last night’ to be deployed to avert suspicion.
‘Wow.’ Brian stumbled from the room, wrapping his softness into his trouser but not zipping. I used the briefing papers on border controls to wipe up the potential baby goo.
‘What did you do to Brian?’ Ali said when she came in. ‘He was crying.’
I pulled noncommittal face 13 as I handed her ejaculate besmirched briefing papers. ‘Get rid of these please,’ I said.
‘What did you do? Spill your latte?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your eleven o’clock is ready.’
We went to a room that had been artfully designed to look like boredom and listened to a drone mouth. I used the time to familiarize myself further with Sally’s responsibilities, which was difficult because her thought voice kept shouting at me. ‘Shut up,’ I told her. ‘Or I’ll have you exterminated.’
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ she negotiated.
‘I am Phil from Zarodz. I’m taking over your body for purposes of education, survival and entertainment. Don’t worry; we can make this work for both of us.’
‘This is…’ followed by inarticulate and frankly distracting screaming.
So far I had gathered that I was above a citizen but below a king, in the same way I was better than a pigeon but not quite as good as a dolphin. All things taken into account. I had a workable intelligence place and was quickly becoming aware of a capacity for destruction that included self-destruction and sadly dolphin destruction. I’d need to send a message to the dolphins at some point. An entire cohort had gambled on that particular manifestation and were going to find themselves either in captivity or tuna tins.
Midday food inning took place with a penman who recorded our conversation as he asked me about ‘my ambitions’. I told him I wanted a workable solution for all problems, a realignment of value systems, a resolution of the previously irresolvable and a new policy on dolphins. I went to the tile room and let out red urine. Potentially blood. Midriff ache set in making me wish superficially that life would end. Sally seemed gleeful.
The Prime Minister looked startled to see me but scanning all published photographs I later realized she looked constantly startled. ‘Well…?’ she said. ‘Tell me the bad news.’
‘Blood urine,’ I told her.
‘What?’ she laughed. ‘Oh, you have your period. Possibly a little too much information. But … ha ha! Girls together and all that.’
Heartiness imitation dissolved into uncomfortable zygomatic spasms.
‘But immigration…’ frowny face middle distance gaze.
‘Yes,’ I said. Then I power-pointed her for ten minutes.
‘Wow,’ she said, copying Brian. ‘I can’t… that’s really impressive, Sally.’
‘You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, Sally,’ Peter Hamill said, permanent secretary, 48 and diabetic.
I got pay car home. Derek and Georgie were watching kickball on the radio window. ‘How are you love?’ Derek said.
‘Perioding.’
‘Lovely. Indian’s in the microwave.’ I assumed it was an idiom and went upstairs to stand in the darkness and consider all I had learned. My smooth meditation was disturbed by a lingering doubt. What did it mean? ‘Indian’s in the microwave’? What fresh barbarity was this?

Week 2
The shouting room proved easy enough. With all the voices raised, mutual erasure. The policy convinced not only the governing people, but the people who wanted to govern but weren’t had to admit gritted through mouth stones the plan, analysis and policy all made brain rightness and released the appropriate brain juice to make a reasonable person smile and say yes that’s it. I went to the window screen nexus and spoke to Jeremy Paxman who loud voiced and was rebutted. Sally enjoyed the show. She is becoming more pliant. She volunteers useful advice. After all, if I am in pain or embarrassed, she had to sit there and take it exactly where I am sitting because in the end Phil and Sally Bowers are the same person. Inhabiting the same space and time.
We went to the pretend we care place and talked to people pretending to be ordinary people who were also pretending to be angry about things they were merely annoyed about. Governing people in other countries are talking about my policy. Hamill contacted me on the testicle cancer machine. His face is like a normal human face, but when I hear his voice, I always picture a large watermelon being punched to bits by a very large gorilla. ‘Why are they calling this the Bowers policy?’ watermelon man said. ‘We explicitly told you to call it the New Morning initiative?’
Across from me Brian Turner wanted to be angry about the roundabout and the one-way system that he believed was negatively impacting his selling foot gloves to people who don’t want foot gloves business. The truth was people bought foot gloves from cheaper foot glove outlets. ‘I need insulin,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I’m diabetic.’
‘So what? So am I?’
‘I need it now.’
‘Well, go and get it.’
Two-fold win. Conversation stopped, and now Hamill would think of me as a fellow sufferer. ‘Where are you going?’
‘You need to take your insulin?’ Brian Turner was heading for the door. ‘I’m sorry but I despise the sight of needles.’
So threefold win.
I told Derek I wanted to stop being married to him. ‘What?’ he said.
‘What?’ said Sally.
‘You mean you want a divorce,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A divorce. I’ll have one of those, please.’
‘What are you doing?’ Sally cried, deep within and louder than ever. Derek’s eyes were splashing about in water and Sally was doing pig slaughter impressions and damned good ones.
‘We’re a family,’ Derek said. ‘Georgie…?’
‘You can keep him,’ I said. ‘And the house.’
‘Why?’
‘You like cocking men,’ I said. This was obviously not the reason but it felt like a good enough reason to present and it was also truth. Sally stopped her abattoir music. ‘Really?’ she said. I internally monologued my evidence.
‘That’s really why he liked watching so much football,’ she said. Football I thought. Not kickball.
The BOSON was very long that evening.
What’s going on? You were supposed to blend in, learn, scout, not do whatever it is you’re doing.
There was no chance of that happening. They’re just too different. Plus, they’ve only got about two hundred years to go the way they’re going about it.
Two hundred? What’s that? Half a TDS?
If that.
Hardly seems worth it. Shall we just exterminate?
No, the place is good and they have giraffes.
What are giraffes?
Here.
Fucking hell!
I know.
Okay. I guess you can have a free hand. What the hell. I mean, we can always exterminate.
I don’t like the idea of extermination. Because there would also be the clean-up and that means destroying everything humans have ever created and removing all trace of them from the planet. This would be a shame as I really like the window shirts they call ‘curtains’. I like caramel macchiato as well. It involves cow tit juice and burned sweet sand. Ali handed me to the cardboard cylinder and smiled with something like terrorism in her eyes. Her fear was kept in check by her ambition. ‘The Prime Minister wondered if you would have a few minutes this afternoon,’ she said.
‘I’ve finished menstruating,’ I told her.
‘So that’s a yes,’ Ali said and backed her way through the door. Brian came in for his five seconds. He was dependent on them now and I exchanged them for a series of job that he would mindlessly and devotedly do for me. ‘That’s disgusting,’ Sally said.
‘You haven’t got a clue,’ I told her. ‘Do you know that birds think that cars are actually animals that you get inside and ride around in?’
‘Birds are stupid.’
‘They’re limited. Crows can only count to five. But they can still count. How far can you count up to?’
‘I don’t know. Infinity I suppose.’
‘You guys are pretty much like crows to me.’
‘That’s not very nice.’
‘There’s an Indian in the microwave,’ I reminded her.
‘That doesn’t mean what you think it means.’
According to Zarodz law, power means safely ignoring stuff. I felt the same way about the languages that were used. We had made a fundamental mistake using google. But going back and redoing the software wasn’t worth the hassle and it had actually becoming entertaining to me, the challenge, of using dumb stupid words with obvious misapplication and still manage to take over the company.

Month 3
The ‘I don’t want to do this job anymore’ speech by the Prime Minister was thought to be her best moment. It was applauded by opposition parties and her own and all the talking about things people loved it and said they loved it. They should have done. I wrote it. I dictated it and Hamill wrote it. Hamill barged into the room the next day.
‘The first day of your leadership campaign and your husband announces that you are getting a divorce and abandoning your family!’ he threw the things you can read on the internet printed out onto the desk.
‘And?’
‘And?’ he looked like he’d been meaning to expel air backwards but had felt the drop of solid in his trouser. ‘And!? How is this going to look?’
‘I’m dedicating myself to the country,’ I said. ‘My marriage was a sham. My cocksman…’
‘Stop calling him that.’
‘…was having other things happen in the bedrooms in hotels.’
‘Oh, god!’
‘Do you know how to buy a caramel macchiato?’ I asked him.
‘I thought you were diabetic,’ he said, startled from his anger (which had been the intention).
‘I got better,’ I told him. I only employed Hamill so it would give me an excuse to get rid of Ali, but the fact was I needed them only in the way I needed Sally’s body, so I would look normal.
BOSON were enjoying the whole thing now. We had rewired the sky with these reflectors so that everyone could see everything back on Zarodz. I’d become a celebrity. Never had we encountered such a ‘civilization’. Honestly, these ‘people’ were just such utter squirters. The leadership contest was no contest at all. Angela Limpett stood against me ‘to engage in debate’, but her head strands looked like a kind of hat and during the debate on the radio window she said something about her father being a hard worker when it turned out her father was a fool face who told the internet printed out and sold daily that Jews were dishonest. It didn’t matter. I had released all my policy ideas, which were carefully calculated to make everyone who read them clap their hands and shout ‘where do I (proverbially) sign?’ which then gave me the idea of having everyone sign up. It would be a CONTRACT FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. I won the leadership contest and went to see the Queen. She didn’t wear her sparkly hat and was covered in powder. I asked if she wanted to sign the contract and be the first. ‘Oh, could I?’ she said, her eyes doing little yippees.
The contract had all my solutions and requested informed consent. It clearly mapped out in succinct language benefits involved on both a personal and national level.
‘What about royal protocol?’ a footman at her shoulder muttered.
‘Pish,’ she said, whipping out a previously unseen ink stick.
Outside video guns and sound suckers took my first prime ministerial audio and video and splashed them all over, even as I thought of the BOSON reflecting it all back to Zarodz. Sally went, ‘for fuck’s sake.’ She was immune to my charms because being with me all this time my intelligence had leaked through her brain splatter and given her made upgrade plug ins she wasn’t shy in using.
Then Ireland phoned and said: ‘Can we be part of the United Kingdom?’
‘How many giraffes do they have?’ I asked.
‘We have a… few in the zoo in Dublin,’ the Taoiseach said.
‘Right you’re in.’
Before long, the Europeans were in touch and the Americans. Hamill told me they were contacting us via diplomatic channels. ‘Where are they?’
‘What?’
‘The channels.’
Hamill laughed and shook his head. ‘Priceless,’ he said, which either meant worthless or invaluable but I didn’t ask.

Year 2
It had been hard, but we had done it. Only one hundred thousand giraffes had existed in the world when I arrived but now, they were protected and thriving, the numbers looked set to rise exponentially. According to my calculations we should have them safely in the millions within two decades. To do this with a real sense of security and to make it irreversible I had spent a lot of time reorganizing the humans in a way that meant the giraffes weren’t unduly bothered by them. First of all, I solved all the wars in the world by getting the countries that made the weapons to stop making weapons. Some knife fights continued but I soon managed to settle that as well. The religions were a tough nut to crack. There was the Jesus was the son of god bunch that was against the Jesus was all right but not the son of god and they both hated the Jesus was a prophet and again not the sun of god, despite a lot of agreement. And then there were all the who’s this Jesus? groups. Lots of them. I offered actual proof of God and using the BOSON delivered. At first, they resisted.
We can’t do that.
Why not?
There’s got to be a rule somewhere.
But I was confident there wasn’t and what with extermination now the only alternative they said okay, run with it. I knew I had them because now everyone on Zarodz was absolutely glued to what was happening. It was top class entertainment though some of the snootier members of the community said that it was trivial pap, similar to the sort of entertainment a very young being might get from tasting one of their own orifices. But these were the kind of Zarodzi that were always complaining as if complaints tasted like strawberries in their mouths.
The BOSON enacted a series of miracles I’d predicted. Parting the Irish Sea so the five giraffes from Dublin zoo could be ushered over in-between the water walls, skirting the Isle of Man and then being received with much joy by ‘The World’s Media’ and me. I took to wearing transparent diaphanous dresses just because it irritated Sally.
‘People can see my nipples,’ Sally would screech in the background.
‘No one is looking at your nipples,’ I told her. ‘They are too busy gazing adoringly at my eyes.’
‘No they’re fucking not,’ she said.
So, I’d solved the wars, the religions had been reconciled and all the refugees had gone back to their country of origin accompanied by the unemployed who worked to rebuild the cities and infrastructure. Palestine and Israel looked at each other like a pair of drunks the morning after a night of debauchery, and with wry amusement did the political equivalent of saying ‘what on earth were we thinking?’ There were hugs as well as some rueful shaking of heads on the day Palesrael was established and the walls and checkpoints ceremoniously dismantled, except for the ones that were daubed with Banksy murals and were preserved for posterity, with NEVER AGAIN written in poignant letters across one section of wall that remained. China phoned that night and said – translated – ‘You know this one-party communist shit is getting pretty old.’ I said, ‘I’m so glad you said it first. We were all thinking the same thing.’
‘Who was that?’ Derek said. He was holding hands with Tom.
‘China,’ I said. ‘They’re in.’
The Sallymass meal had been wonderful and we’d radio windowed it internationally because of the ‘unprecedented demand’ and Georgie gave me an awkward hug. I thought he might want to ejaculate but Sally shouted ‘NO!’ and for once I thought it better to listen to her. He’d settled back into the education house and with my reforms already in place his intelligence was significantly better than that of crows. Sally was happy to have him near her and I let her take a bit of control and enjoy it a while. A celebrity food preparer famous for shouting at idiots prepared it and we inned it, happily. Tom slapped alcohol juice into his front hole and Georgie got all wet faced when he had to go so I let him come to Buckingham Palace where the Queen was waiting for me with Hamill for a nightcap. The Queen was getting into this being more involved thing. I liked having her around. She always knew when it was time to have a laugh. ‘So what does the New Year bring?’ she asked. ‘Africa, Europe, the Americas and now if tonight is trustworthy also Asia, all have been brought under your benevolent power. So what next? Rid the world of disease?’
‘Dolphins,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Hamill, who had been a great critic of my giraffes policy.
‘Dolphins. There are lots left but I want them to really take off. How many dolphins do we have Georgie?’
‘Common dolphin: 3,179,000, Striped dolphin: 1,485,000, Spotted dolphin: 1,782,000, and finally the Spinner dolphin…’
‘My favourite,’ said the Queen.
‘1,582,000.’
Everyone chipofftheoldblocked etc but Hamill still wasn’t convinced. What he didn’t know was that his aorta was like a bicycle innertube that was about to pop. It saddened me. I’d got him addicted to the 5 second ejaculate. Actually, I’d got so well practiced it now only took 2 seconds from flaccid to wa-hey! Maybe another discreet one in the bathrooms of the Palace would get him to lean closer to my position but the problem was his aorta probably wouldn’t like it. ‘Okay,’ I said, doing up turned corners of the mouth thing. ‘Dolphins and world disease.’
Liz clapped her hands, delighted. ‘Frightfully good.’
And we drank port.
Next day, Jenny phoned to sad news me that I don’t know how to say this but Peter and then three dotting his demise. I brushed my mouth stones and spat. When I looked in the mirror, Sally looked back, eye-splashing with mute on.

Decade 3
Never drink port. If there is one lesson it is that the ruby red sweet fortified wine gives you the head bashing that is usually reserved for the truly evil in a just universe where the retributors have really large hammers and the punishment for evil is to be hit in the head with the hammers. Port. I got hooked. Long dead Lizzie set me up and I suspect if this isn’t my inner voice paranoiaing me to confusion that she did it on purpose. Like when she said to me ‘Would you like to wear the crown?’ And I said what? The shiny hat? And there was a flinch. She flinched. Like when Georgie killed himself and at the funeral Derek hugged me but the hug turned into a squeeze and he tried to throw me in the hole him and all while the security men despite all their expertise finding it difficult to pry open the iron arms of grief. And all the world’s media were there to capture the moment. Worse yet, it spooked the giraffes. When they finally got me out of the hole and my diaphanous dress badly ripped, they pulled Derek up and I told them to punch Derek in the face. ‘As hard is humanly possible.’ They didn’t want to do this and it was probably the port bastard behind my eyes but I went a bit apeshit screaming, ‘Do it just do it’ like I was a Nike advertising slogan from the turn of the millennia but being emotively misapplied.
Sally was mad with grief and definitely blamed me. ‘Coldness, lack of empathy, inhuman!’ she accused and yelled. ‘Inhuman?’ I risposted. ‘Obvs.’
These humans are such a bunch of stupid shits. They’re hardly even here. What? Eighty years maybe? Hundred tops? And Georgie couldn’t even get to forty. The minute the miniature blood bags squirt into the world you should start mourning them because they’re already on their way to the soil place.
All over the new reformed infoscrawl that gets projected four feet in front of everyone as a result of the BOSON like technology I gifted them, replays of this humiliation were interrupted only by reports of the REBELLION. At first my people said it was underground and in one of my now thankfully rare lapses into literalism I had them excavating hither and yonder. Seven thousand square miles of open cast mining took place in all the likeliest spots before someone got up the moxy to add a question mark to the end of a sentence and I could dial it back.
Palesrael – ungrateful goat vagina ejaculators – became a center of resistance against the United States of Everyone, but bubbles of discord were starbucking all over the globe. But instead of delicious caramel macchiato screeds of extraterrestrial conspiracy and revolutionary calls to seize control were being launched. My own fault for educating everybody beyond their previous crowlike limits. No one was close to me. Even a 5 TDS-old Zardozi could outwit them, but there was a cumulative bacterial intelligence to their numbers.
It meant when I got back to the Palace and food outed from my mouth into the sucking chair, I was not feeling my best. I should not have picked up the Boson.
Okay, enough already with the giraffes and the dolphins.
You don’t like them anymore?
We like them all right, but ruddy nora…
Look, I’m not a branch of the light entertainment industry you know!
You kinda are.
What?
And it’s getting boring. And dark. What was all that stuff with Derek and the grave and you telling them to punch him in the face.
I was upset.
Why?
I just buried my son.
Oh my God.
What is it?
You really are upset.
What are you talking about?
You’re burying your feelings. You’re acting out and lashing out. Even to us, but really you are upset. Phil, what’s going on with you?
Why did he have to do it? I gave him everything. I made him clever; I gave him a great job; security; everything he could have asked for. Why couldn’t he just be happy?
Maybe he needed to do those things himself. Maybe all the gifts you gave… maybe they are like the dolphins and the giraffes. I mean they don’t know how the populations have increased and they don’t care. They’re never gonna be grateful. They’re not gonna rebel. But a human, well, maybe a human needs to think that they’re doing it themselves. And if they don’t they do rebel. Or they surrender.
I guess.
You don’t guess. Think about it. You know.
I got carried away.
But you felt things like a human being.
It’s the port.
Probably that’s part of it. But still…
I guess we’ve learned a lot.
We’ve learned something.
Not a lot?
Get over yourself, Phil. We’re Zardozi. We know practically everything to begin with.
So what next?
Extermination?
Lord, I thought you’d never ask.

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