Paul Taylor came from an Idaho ranch at the foot of the Rockies to study at the University of California at Berkeley. It was the late summer of 1966, and Berkeley was at the epicenter of a political, cultural, sexual and musical revolution that meant to change the world. Nothing could have prepared the brilliant and earnest 19 year old for the magnitude of the changes that would alter his life forever. Some of these changes were embodied in the young daughter of a professor, wise beyond her years, bursting with creative energy, a dancer who seemed to offer a kind of love, a degree of freedom Paul Taylor had never imagined, much less experienced. Other changes were more universal, from the words of Martin Luther King echoing across the University plaza and across America to the music thundering though the Fillmore Auditorium and the Monterey Pop Festival to rock the foundations of culture, across the country and around the world. Berkeley Blues is a moving personal journey through those seminal and unrepeatable times, a love story set in the crucible of those beautiful, turbulent years.
The name Busby Berkeley, creator of the dances for films such as 42nd Street, Babes in Arms, and Million Dollar Mermaid, is synonymous with the spectacular musical production number. Films, television commercials, and MTV videos continue to use "Berkeleyesque" techniques long after Berkeley himself and the genre that nourished him have faded from the scene. The first major analysis of Berkeley's career on stage and screen, Showstoppers emphasizes his relationship to a colorful, somewhat disreputable tradition of American popular entertainment: that of P. T. Barnum, minstrel shows, vaudeville, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, burlesque, and the Ziegfeld Follies. Rubin shows how Berkeley absorbed this declining theatrical tradition during his years as a Broadway dance director and then transferred it to the new genre of the early movie musical. With lively prose and engaging photographs, Showstoppers explores new ways of looking at Busby Berkeley, at the musical genre, and at individual films. Appropriate for both specialists and general readers, Showstoppers is an exuberant study of a figure whose career, Rubin notes, "provides an extraordinarily rich point of convergence for a wide range of cultural and artistic contexts".
One of the great continuing disputes of U.S. politics is about the role of the Supreme Court. Another is about the First Amendment. This book is about both. A classic defense of the openly political role of the Court, this book belies the notion reasserted recently by Chief Justice Roberts that judges are just neutral umpires. Especially in the area of speech, judges make policy; they create law.
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