Critic Marshall Berman Kicks Off Experiment in Urban Democracy   

Friday, March 24, 7 p.m.271 Alexander Avenue (b/w 138th and 139th Streets)

"Let's say I'm right, and current mass cultural productions are 'nothing', yet the people who see them and hear them will do just what I've done all my life, just what my parents did on the subway going back to the Bronx, just what my kids are doing when they remember songs and movie lines in their own funny ways. They will put their something into that nothing, and then, out of the fusion of something and nothing, they will create something new."

NEW YORK CITY (March 20, 2006) – In Marshall Berman's  latest book On the Town: One hundred years of spectacle in Times Square, the renowned Bronxite and CUNY Graduate Center professor of political theory weaves a literary portrait about the promises of modernism, urban delight and individual wandering--a place that was, but that can still be.

A beautifully curated trip into forgotten U.S. films and arcane Broadway shows, On the Town delves into the deeper social meanings of art products and the street--the life of New York City. It urges us to think about our inalienable power to imagine future utopias and criticize real existing bullshit, and vice versa.

In this latest work, Berman presents himself, again, as a stubborn believer in the notion that the full poetic power of streets has been repressed by ignorance and fear. On the Town reminds us that desirable technologies of sociability can be lost, not only to financial greed but to plain indifference.

Berman is homegrown proof that before the billionaire ball players, before the burning buildings, and before the Corcoran Group's roving eye for real estate, the Bronx was a place where the modern spirit mattered, where financial hardship did not necessarily lead to existential poverty, and where the whole world was on the town.

The brainchild of a group of conscientious citizens and community activists, the Bronx Salon series is a platform for public discussion of urban issues in the private environment of a regular house. A presentation on relevant social, cultural, and political questions followed by discussion, music, dancing, and performance art, each event will be an exercise in urbane democracy and homely criticism--literally. From sports to philosophy, from urban planning to poetry, each Bronx Salon event imagines city living as an experience where the private space propels public discussion and where everyone can engage and be engaged, listen and speak, question and be questioned, be charmed and mingle.

Set in the South Bronx, the invitation uptown is full of meaning. On the verge of gentrification and capital development, we wish to lure people to one of the few working class neighborhoods remaining in the city. The neighborhood craves development, on its own terms. It craves change, for community involvement and action. The Bronx Salon is a step in that direction.

Bronx community residents as well as allies from all over are welcome to attend. When you visit a friend's house you don't trash it up, but you don't fix it up either. That's the way neighborhoods should be understood and lived. That's the Bronx Salon way.

Bringing homes out to the city, bringing the city home.