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ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR Th e Experienc e of Modernity. By Marshall Berman. New York: Simon & Schuster. MARSHALL BERMAN loves the Bronx. At the end of this occasionally endearing but intellectually porous book, Berman, professor of political science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, proposes if not a solution, at least a kind of cultural palliative for the urban blight of which the beloved borough of his birth has become an infamous model.
Berman's revenge on that monstrosity devised by Robert Moses, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, would be a gigantic mural, 'executed in a number of radically different styles' and painted onto eight miles of brick and concrete retaining walls running alongside the expressway. This community art work would defy the ghastly present with a portrayal of the Bronx's glorious history back to the great waves of immigration at the beginning of this century. At the end of the Bronx mural (at 'the boundary between the Bronx and the world'), there would be an enormous ceremonial arch, which 'would be circular and inflatable, suggesting both an automobile tire and a bagel. When fully pumped up, it would look as indigestibly hard as a bagel, but ideal as a tire for a fast getaway; when soft, it would appear leaky and dangerous as a tire but, as a bagel, inviting to settle down and eat.' ' Forget the vaguely sickening quality of that soggy bageled arch. Forget the threat to traffic safety which such a presumably gripping mural would create.