Baku

[pynchonoid]

"The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the
dark. Hunchbacks, lepers, hebephrenics and amputees of
all descriptions have come popping out of their secret
spaces to watch the fun. They loll back against the
rusting metal flanks of refinery hardware, their whole
common sky in a tessellation of primary colors. They
occupy the chambers and bins and pockets of
administrative emptiness left after the Revolution,
when the emissaries from Dutch Shell were asked to
leave, and the English and Swedish engineers all went
home. It is a period now in Baku of lull, of
retrenchment. All the oil money taken out of these
fields by the Nobels has gone into Nobel Prizes. New
wells are going down elsewhere, between the Volga and
the Urals. Time for retrospection here, for refining
the recent history that's being pumped up fetid and
black from other strata of Earth's mind. . . . 
(GR, 354)

...found while looking for something else (after
talking yesterday with a friend who spent time with
Cliburn and his formidable mother, Rildia Bee, in the
70s, after meeting a Julliard classmate of Cliburn's
last Thursday):


http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/33_folder/33_articles/33_vancliburn.html

[...] In the United States, this period followed the
McCarthy Senate Hearings where anybody with the
slightest, or even imagined, affiliation with
communism was branded as subversive. To complicate
matters, a few months prior to the Competition, on
October 10, 1957, the Soviets had shocked the world by
launching Sputnik, the first man-made satellite ever
to orbit the earth. Americans had been beaten in the
race to space. It was a devastating psychological
blow. Sputnik symbolized the technological superiority
of a totalitarian government. Even more frightening
was the possibility that such rockets could carry
atomic bombs. Americans feared communism would soon
take over the world. 

Enter 23-year-old Van Cliburn, child prodigy pianist
from Kilgore, Texas. [...]

Cliburn had the chance to perform in Baku only once.
It was his first trip back to the Soviet Union after
the Competition. Actually, he had expected the entire
concert to be canceled because of the U-2 Affair that
had occurred in early May when the Soviets shot down
the U.S. reconnaissance plane and captured pilot, Gary
Powers, whom they imprisoned as a spy. 

Relations between the two countries broke off. An
Official State Visit by Eisenhower was canceled. Since
Van's trip had been organized by the U.S. State
Department as part of a cultural exchange, he expected
the same until a special directive from Khruschev told
him to proceed with the concert tour as originally
planned.

He toured various cities in the Soviet Union on that
trip including Moscow, Riga, Minsk, Kiev, Sochi,
Leningrad, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. He managed to squeeze
in two days in Baku where he gave a single
concert-June 28, 1960. [...]

One of the most vivid memories was the ride into the
city from the airport-passing miles and miles of oil
derricks. "The Azerbaijanis asked me whether I had
ever seen anything like this before? I told them my
father was an oil executive with Magnolia Petroleum
(which later became known as Mobil Oil Company) and
besides, I had grown up in Kilgore in East Texas
which, in 1930, had had the largest oil boom up to
that time in the history of the U.S. The oil wells in
Kilgore are packed together so closely; it's amazing!
They found it hard to believe that I was so familiar
with similar fields like their own. Small world, isn't
it?"

"By the way," Cliburn added at the conclusion of our
interview. "Are those wonderful old oil derricks still
standing in Baku? And are they still stretching far
out into the Caspian Sea?" [...]

<http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=Baku&btnG=Search+News>

...just for fun:

<http://www.bakutoday.net/view.php?d=1783>
 
Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO) has been observed
again over Baku this week. UFO was flying, different
colors lights were brightening around it. 
05/01/2003 14:04 
Baku Today 

According to the information given to "olaylar" news
agency by expert in UFO Fuad Gasimov, chairman of
Cosmic Seismological Department of Azerbaijan National
Aero cosmic Agency, appearance of UFOs in the sky is
symbolic and it is an alarm signal. 
"Something must happen," he said. “If we analyze the
processes going on in the world, we would observe that
probability of war becomes high in Iraq.” 

F.Gasimov stated that the appearance of UFOs is reason
for probability of outbreak of Iraq war. “They try to
prevent the war,” expert said. 

The appearance of UFOs in Azerbaijan sky may be
estimated as a warning against the republic too expert
in UFO says. In case war outbreaks the objects are
against of use of the Azerbaijani airport. 

Some scientists claim that UFOs were also observed
before and warned about natural disaster. Mr.Gasimov
stated that UFOs hinder the prediction of earthquakes
and researches carried out in this field. 

"They don't want mankind reveal their secret. But
there are some facts stating that UFOs keep in touch
with the scientists. Though most approach this
unserious, objects keep in touch with selected persons
by the means of Morse alphabet or telepathy signals
and transmit information related to the future". 

According to Mr.Gasimov, Einshteyn dreamed about the
idea on A-bomb. Besides it, German scientist who
invented bomb wrote in his memories that he invented
it in his dream. "All this ground that these claims
are true,” expert insists. 

information provided by Olaylar. "










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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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