Lord Nuneaton Savage is back from his lair, and he’s got some…erm, SPEED. When he characterises his writing as ‘infantile’, the adjective rises to Nietzschean dimensions (in a good way). Anyway, bring it on…

PART 1: The robotic pleasure principle

‘Let’s go!” I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at last. We’re about to see the Centaur’s birth and, soon after, the first flight of Angels!’

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909

I love the above. Love how, despite its revelation that mythology and ‘the Mystic Ideal’ are dead, the new birthed bright beasts are those mythic perennials, Centaurs and Angels. Despite my distrust of self-conscious Futurism (I’m sorry, Futurists, you’re just not fuckable enough) I adore it’s unconscious contradictions, its youthful amphetamine verve, but most of all I adore its SPEED.

Oh, speed! A velocity fit to make beasts of us all! The shining strip lights from the grilles of a smashed Testerrosa! Mangled bodies in chariot wreckage! Because the only good temple is a temple on fire!

Chrome – Slip it to the Android

Is that a violin?

Speed: most religious of substances, most holy of feelings. Pinprick-tunnel-zero. Itchy scalps and hands, hands with things to do and people to touch.

Chrome are the Howling Hounds of a Gum Grinding God. So sped up that the only way for their bodies to go is inward. A sudden violent contraction into gibber land. The only way to dance to Chrome is to stand and shake: shake so fast your movement is rendered imperceptible to the naked eye. Baby, you’re a blur, and I LOVE IT.

Rattle! Rattle like a whore-robot’s eye balls!

PART 2: The all-cleansing zero eye

Speed is not velocity, it is focus. The willed fascination with the single roaring stimulus; the nerve system jangling like keys from a jailer’s belt-loop.

To this end, I give you: All the colours and more.

Faust – Krautrock

There are drums and then there are…

No instruments were used in the making this recording. No, this is the sound of the amplified human velocity heart. The tidal roar of the body shaking itself aware. If the quest is for a New Psychedelia of the Human Body (what else is there?) then speed is our sacrament. Put away your bags of mushrooms; burn your cacti and drain the acid from the water supply: we’ve been tripping steadily for the last hundred years anyway.

SHAKE, SHAKE, SHAKE YER’SELVES FREE!

No preachers needed; no dance too stoopid.

Faust, Monks influenced as they were (I was sooo happy when I found that out), and, of course, coming from Germany where they take speed very seriously indeed (go stand by an autobahn and tell me I’m wrong) know what a focused wo/man mind on fire sounds like; where it lies; what lies it tells when it gets there.

Them drums don’t thunder, they plunder…

PART 3: Speed doesn’t kill, but it does talk a lot of bollocks

”You! Yes, you! your mouth is flapping!

You have disgraced yourself with terrible lies!

You have upset the grace of living!”

To which I reply…

”No! It is you that has upset the delicate beast we call earth!

Have made the sky weep sulphurous tears!

Whose infantile focus on truth has chained you behind the great veil!

I speak all of my mind; every last dribble and squeek, fart and gurgle!

How, then can this be untruth?!

And I’m fuck sight of a better dancer than you are!”

For it is one of the few truths worth klinging to: Speed is for the dancers. Speed could even ensure that you keep up with this:

The Four Tops – Seven Rooms of Gloom

Egad! Casino Thunder!

He sings of heartbreak, not due to his spurnings but because his heart is about to break! To tear itself in two under the enormous pressures of running to catch up with a drum powered jet engine!

Faster man, faster!

His mind is capsizing. All he can see are the flashing lights from the ending of 2001. He slips in and out of consciousness, back to his beginnings as primordial soup. But what is that rhythm? Urging him on? Forcing him back to the amusement arcade?

It is the terrible beating of his own heart!

With this realisation he is propelled forward by feet other than his own: The Flash; Merlin being blown to Bermuda! he sails past the tormenting engine, bearing a grin the size of a plateau!

The prize is his, and none may stand in his path! He has reached point zero, where the true Psychedelia of the Screaming Body obliterates all pain. All desire is fulfilled, because in the act of wanting everything we realise that nothing is worth having!

He is the Man of Speed!

He is human and more than human!

He is going to be sore in the morning!

Speed, my friends, speedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeedspeed…..

*Repeat to fade*

This one for Uwe Nettelbeck. Until now, he asked. Now he knows.

Epilogue -
This post is tagged with beasts bodies centaurs eye balls eye speed filippo tommaso marinetti flight of angels futurism futurists i adore imperceptible kraut krautrock mystic mythology nerve system nietzschean pleasure principle shake shake slip it to the android velocity