Bronx Salon Opening Event: An Evening with Marshall Berman    See photos of this event here!   Friday, March 24, 2006 7 p.m. 271 Alexander Ave., Bronx, New York (between 138 & 139 St.) Directions: Take 6 train to first stop in the Bronx: 3rd Ave/138th Street. Walk to Alexander and 138th Street. Then walk on Alexander Avenue towards 139th Street. The house is on the same block, on the same side of the street as the police precinct. Space is Limited -- RSVP Strongly Encouraged To view the press release for this event, click here. 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. The book's main argument is... "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". 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. See photos of this event here!