In Varna on the Black Sea, a dance troupe puts on a show of Bulgarian folkdancing.
In Topanga Canyon, just above Malibu on the Pacific Coast, people dance en masse, and every body goes with the flow, like wow, man.
In any event, on the Black Sea or the Pacific Ocean, there’s nothing more beautiful than a dancer. Especially a woman dancer.
The blood of the Thracians flows through Boryana of Boryanabooks fame. (She’s the lady in the picture below, on the right). The Thracians were the people who produced Orpheus and Spartacus. They were horsemen and goldsmiths but mostly they loved to make love and sing and dance. So dancing runs in Boryana’s blood. And so it does, apparently, in other people’s, such as the lady next to Boryana at this Armenian engagement party in Sherman Oaks.
Dancing is the way into paradise, whether you’re an American, a whirling dervish, one of the mysterious peoples who rode out of the Steppes to the Black Sea, or an African, or an Armenian.
Instead of staying home on New Year’s Eve, Lionel and Boryana ventured forth to The Great Greek in Sherman Oaks to dance away the night and properly welcome 2010. Complaining of his bad back, Lionel danced a jig or two but felt terribly awkward. So he settled down to watch and take a picture or two. He wasn’t really complaining. After all, he was surrounded by two beautiful women: Maya on the left and Boryana on the right. Two Bulgarian beauties—that’s close enough to Greek for this night anyway.
The bank strikes up. That’s a real bazouki.
First, the men begin dancing. That part doesn’t excite Lionel much.
Pretty soon, though, Boryana and Maya are dancing like the wild Thracian ladies of old.
And Maya and Boryana aren’t the only ones.
Later in the evening, Maya sat down to contemplate the approaching New Year. Boryana then joined her in toasting the New Year. And so far, it’s been a good year. So the moral is: keep singing and dancing.
ALTHOUGH IN THIS CASE, IT WAS A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT. IT WASN’T JUST BORYANABOOKS. THE SKY, THE MOUNTAINS, AN UNMOURNED FIRE & ONE IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY WERE ALSO INVOLVED.
Sallie Cruise, the beautiful spouse of the august Theo ten Brummelaar, associate director of the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy at Mt. Wilson, wasn’t just celebrating to the Boryanabooks.com beat. It was also her birthday. Still, as she sang and danced and opened gifts from those she loved, she was not unaffected by the presence of some of the website’s most ardent proponents and supporters. There was also the fine deep inky sky and everything was crackling with anticipation, good food and good conversation. The Station Fire which had recently denuded the San Gabriels, even around Mt. Wilson itself, had been swept into history. It hadn’t been so long since the sky had been full of towering sheets of menacing flames, some of them leaping hundreds of feet into the air. So now, with those gone, the air was vibrant with many reasons to celebrate. Every thing throbbed with life. And what’s that in her hand? Look closely. Our natural modesty keeps us from being more explicit. We at Boryanabooks are ever so modest. And celebratory.
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Boryana has been having a blast getting www.boryanabooks.com going. The other day, she grabbed a margarita in a fancy seaside resort hotel, and pondered it all. She was pleased. She felt so inspired, she went to the beach and danced a jig like the gymnast she once was.
Then, like another famed creator, she rested a day, and sent photographers out to document the boryanabooks beat sweeping Southern California. So, on a hot summer night in Eagle Rock, photographer and movie computer genius Lucas Janin grabbed a shot of dancer Esther Rovin dancing through rings of fire.
Photographer Mike Chamness, meanwhile, got some great shots of Melanie’s dance troupe at Topanga Days.
Boryana of www.boryanabooks is pleased. Very pleased. She began this website planning on setting the world on fire, selling the best and most creative writing, music and video around. Come back to this site often and see what we’re doing. We have lots of plans. You won’t want to miss any of it.
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In California, the home of www.boryanabooks.com, you go to the beach (in this case Malibu beach) and you’ll see the children prancing and the birds either contemplating flying or flying. It’s all part of the great prance and dance of life, so powerfully captured in the books and recordings we will have on boryanabooks.
Boryanabooks.com was born from the loins of California Classics Books, an old fashioned literary publisher dedicated to fine typography in books about West coast history, literature, politics and music. California Classics Books published books on subjects such as Los Angeles literature and history, ghosts towns in the Mojave Desert, two books on Frank Zappa, one by a former lover and colleague and another by Frank’s sister Pat. It also published books on Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist whose career began in San Francisco.
Boryanabooks.com will continue to reflect much of this tradition in books both electronic and paper. But it will broaden its scope by going multimedia with music and videos. We began Boryanabooks convinced that the time of New York publishing has come and gone and that it will never find its way out of a severe decline.
Boryanabooks.com is where you will find the nexus of real media change, and a powerful reason to dance.
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Last week, my grandson Ethan, aged eleven, and I went to Santa Cruz on the north end of the Monterey Bay for a few days. From the beach, where I stood watching him as he swam into the waves, I saw the pale blue uneven line on the southern end, which is Monterey.
I rode the Hurricane and Logger's Revenge on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with him. I also rented a little car from the hotel that went forty miles an hour and we drove through cold thick fog up to the University past startled deer and two or three complaisantly beautiful students. The car was open, it was too small for drivers in other cars to see even though it was canary yellow, it didn't have a steering wheel but a thing like a motorcycle steering mechanism, and Ethan frequently put his long strong young fingers over my hands and tried to take control of the steering and screamed in my ear, “Faster Grandma! Faster!” I think Ethan may not be a contemplative child but he may be contemplative at a rate of speed so I am incapable of seeing it, as people are incapable of hearing sounds that dogs hear.
On the drive back to return him to his parents and little brother, Ethan and I stopped in Aptos at the Rummonds Building. Jim Rummonds bought the building when I was working for him in the mid 1980s. He wasn't in his office when Ethan and I stopped by but his wife Sue and assistant Chansonette were there, and we lied to each other and said we had not changed. Actually, Sue hadn't changed and she didn't lie about anything.
DESCENDANT
Elissaveta Bagryana
No portraits of my grandfathers are kept fixed in a family picture-book. I know nothing of the testaments they left, The lives they led, their souls, their looks.
But I sense the wandering, self-willed beat of the ancient blood of all my kin. Its raging rouses me from sleep, it draws me to our first-found sin.
Perhaps some grandmother — dark-eyed, with silken pantaloons and turban — escaped at darkest night to ride with an alien, fair-featured Khan.
Perhaps across the Danubian Plain hooves came drumming on the chase. Yet they were saved from being slain for the wind smoothed our their every trace.
Perhaps because of this I'm gripped by lands unseized by human eyes, by horses that fly at the crack of the whip, the wind-splashed, free-affirming cry.
Perhaps along my way I'll falter and lies and sin may show my worth. But I am, indeed, your faithful daughter, by bond of blood, my mother earth.
Tranlated from Bulgarian by Kevin Ireland