Strike up the jukebox and the magic begins! Shove a coin in the stamped-tin slot, give it a push with the ball of your thumb, rough and brutal, and the spirit of the times begins to twang: droning, clanking, blaring, eardrum-bursting, the hand of the times unleashes the din, the hand of a young wildcatter, gas station attendant, or trucker, a boy’s hand but already a workman’s paw, a few grips learned by repetition is all it knows: the grab, the yank, the shove, the twist, the push, ignorant of relaxed, idle fingers, eloquent gestures that remodel a word, make a thought spatial, suggest a caress. The hand of the times, no longer an instrument to initiate sublime events, no longer a hand that paints like Piero della Francesca, not a hand that sets tones singing like the hands of the boy Mozart, not a hand that writes like the poet Eichendorff. A mercenary’s hand, the thumb horny from counting its wages, sliding the bills again and again across an index finger bent from pulling a trigger, smooth from familiarity with the utensils of murder: money-grubbing hand—let the coins begin to jingle, shove them into the stamped-tin slot; no swindle possible: the machine is finely adjusted to the size and weight of each coin, it registers the slightest deviation, the smallest irregularity, the most trivial-seeming difference and immediately jams, your hand has to push it in with horny fingers, roughly, so the whole cabinet shakes, the heavy, bulky cabinet of iron, tin, and plastic, all sorts of serrated, fluted, stamped, shopworn, dented tin, all sorts of plastic bulges and groins, plastic with tin inlays, tin with plastic inlays, a mongrel of cowboy saddle and squeezebox, oil sheik’s Rolls and vaquero’s guitar, soda fountain and Mexican revolver, the tropical night lurking within, full of jungle screams, gives it a good whack, it’s a bit sleepy, the old gorilla, doesn’t react in a split second like it used to, Tarzan has it easy, his thumb gives a shove, the coin clatters into the metallic entrails, a soft, elastic click indicates it has come to rest in a kind of trigger guard, the final instructions have yet to be given before the spinning soup pot rises into the ionosphere, the triple rows of plastic-button teeth in its shark’s mouth transmit them telegraphically, the selection-button molars pass them on to the sharp incisors of tin-rimmed cards in the title catalogue, which convey them to the vertical stacks of baleen discs—the three stages of ignition—then the horny thumb gives another push, pushes from the shoulder with a brief twist of the upper body taken up by the hips, a dry shove of the bent arm, a thrust into King Kong’s heart, the bulletproof armor plates of the prehistoric monster clank in alarm, the iron entrails of the enemy-occupied space station are jostled together until at last the release is accomplished amid flickering electric discharges: apotheoses of flaming light, blazing spectra coil in slowly rising and falling spirals, aureoles fan out and disperse, geysers of synthetic visual stimuli join the billowing wreathes of light which curl up like incense smoke and undulate down like a desert god’s pillars of fire into arcaded arches, erecting cupolas, oil-sheik Alhambras melted down into Sabena-borealis, grand vomitatio of ice-cream colors, tapping a super-rolling mill of sound: like a burst of fire the aural fare shoots out of the triple-toothed baleen whale’s gorge, Jonah the American, pours out in the primitive form of a musical motif, gets caught under the pile-driving beat and is squashed, hacked, steamrolled flatter and flatter into cheaper and cheaper clattering tin, grooved, serrated, stamped, processed to be consumed by trash dumps from which the lime slurry of neon tubes flows into the starry sky on high, the lymph of suburban mange: the mournful wailing of suburbia that has devoured the city and all cities.