The Magnificent Wurlitzer

Wurlitzer is the machine that plays all music in its own sweet way. It is creation, innovation, improvisation - a farrago-medley of beauty and bad taste. It is also the nickname of the CIA - Intelligence, politicking, stabs in the dark, secret things, codified meanings. The book plays off the crisis of modernism, its slippage into postmodernism, where anything goes and nothing moves, against its critique of the heartland, of Modernity, which is both sharp as an axe and malleable as clay. Modernisation brings the four horsemen of the apocalypse, drinkable tapwater, the Russian Revolution, the Internet and the Crash."