Giant nests perplex experts

By Garry Mitchell
The Associated Press
October 12, 2006

MOBILE — To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.

Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven’t determined exactly what’s behind the surprisingly large nests.

Auburn University entomologists, who say they’ve never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama’s Black Belt.

At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago.

“It was one of the largest ones we’ve seen,” McLean said.

Attached to two walls and under the slab, the nest had to be removed in sections, McLean said.

Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn said he’s aware of about 16 of what he described as “super-sized” nests in south Alabama.

Ray said he’s seen 10 of them and cautioned people about going near them because of the yellow jacket’s painful sting.

The largest nest Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.

“I’m kind of afraid for the grandkids. I had to sneak down there at dark and get my tractor out of the barn,” Coker said. “It’s been a disruption.”

Coker said he may wait until a winter freeze to try to remove the nest.

In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.

Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February — and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built in shallow underground cavities.

Yellow jackets, often confused with bees, may visit flowers for sugar, but unlike bees, yellow jackets are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food, according to scientists.
“They were able to find food to colony through the winter,” Ray said in a telephone interview.

He investigated a nest near Pineapple, measuring about 5 feet by 4 feet, that was coming out of the ground on a roadside. A southwest Pike County house in Goshen had a giant nest spreading into its roof.

Goshen Mayor G. Malon Johnson said he consulted Ray in removing it because he was concerned that children playing nearby could be attacked.

A colony has a maximum size in early July and August. The hot, dry conditions could force the yellow jackets out of ground nests.

“Normally it starts declining in the fall,” Ray said.

He said the “super colonies” appear to have many queens.

“We’re not really sure how this multiple queen thing works,” Ray said. “It could be that the daughters of the original queen don’t leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate.”

Ray examined a collected nest from Macon County to count the queens in it.

“We found 12 queens so far, so that’s definitely a factor,” Ray said Thursday.

Dr. Michael D. Goodisman, a biologist at Georgia Tech who has studied large nests in Australia, said he’s heard of some large ones in Georgia and Florida, but not as big as those in Alabama.A 6-foot by 3-foot nest on a pond stump in Bulloch County, Ga., was featured July 12 on CNN.

“I’m not sure people know what triggers it,” he said.

U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist James H. Cane said he’s familiar with a nest in Florida 10 or 15 years ago that engulfed a big easy chair. Cane said the monster nests reported in Alabama are intriguing and agreed with Ray that they could be the product of multiple queens in a single nest.

The nest usually dies out each year. “All that overwinters is the future queen,” he said.

Given a queen’s egg-laying rate, he said, there’s no way a nest with a single queen could get that big in a growing season.

But in a multiple-queen colony, Cane said, there must be space where queens can’t get at each other.

Link courtesy Dave Tompkins!

Psychedelia: Paying homage to its origins

In 1966, a riotous extravaganza at the Roundhouse brought together the cream of British counterculture – and gave birth to psychedelia. Daniel Spicer looks back

Published: 11 October 2006, The Independent

It sounds like an impossible Sixties dream. Psychedelic oil-projections ooze over the walls and the faces of London’s movers and shakers, crammed into a semi-derelict Victorian building. Paul McCartney is here, disguised in shades and Arab burnous. Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull swagger in with a more brazen cool. Pink Floyd, fronted by Syd Barrett, and the original Soft Machine pump out experimental rock’n’roll in the marijuana-scented night. Girls in miniskirts hand out sugar cubes. A 6ft-tall jelly slithers and slides all over the floor as the less inhibited guests strip off and dive into the slippery mess.

It’s not a set piece from some heavy-handed pastiche; this scene unfolded at London’s Roundhouse 40 years ago this weekend – on 15 October 1966 – at the launch party of England’s first underground newspaper, The International Times. This “All-Night Rave Pop Op Costume Masque Ball” has subsequently entered countercultural myth as one of the great parties of the Sixties but, according to some, this was much more than a mere late-night revel. Daevid Allen, guitarist with Soft Machine at the time and later founder of cosmic-proggers Gong, has described the IT launch as “one of the most revolutionary events in the history of English alternative music and thinking”. As the socio-cultural upheavals of the Sixties are subjected to ever more scrutiny, this event is becoming regarded as one of the defining moments of the UK underground. Certainly, it was probably the first time the capital’s burgeoning crowd of mid-Sixties proto-hippie “freaks” had massed on their own turf to put their new imperatives into such bold – and visible – action.

As an organiser of the event, author Barry Miles offers a perspective on where he and other countercultural architects such as John “Hoppy” Hopkins got their inspiration. “We knew a lot about [Andy] Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable because Hoppy’s girlfriend, Kate Heliczer, had been part of that scene. Also Gerard Malanga was around in late 1965 – he was the whip dancer with The Velvet Underground, so we knew about it through him.”

As much as Warhol’s bacchanalias can be credited as a direct influence, the IT launch was clearly the logical culmination of a growing indigenous scene. In June 1965, Miles, Hoppy and others had staged The International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, putting Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg onstage for what was billed as Britain’s first “happening”. The Marquee Club on Wardour Street had started Sunday afternoon sessions called Spontaneous Underground in January 1966, featuring live music from Pink Floyd, Donovan, AMM and others. Later the same year, Pink Floyd had played a number of free gigs under the banner of the London Free School – a Portobello Road-based coalition of housing activists and hipsters.

Yet none of this detracts from the fact that the IT launch was a massive boost for the underground – not least because of the newspaper. Author and former International Times contributor Mick Farren remembers the immediate effect of the paper’s launch. “There were a lot of things happening all over the city but they weren’t hooked together. The IT thing was a launch party for a fortnightly tabloid, which provided a network for a lot of people who had previously been working in isolation.”

At a time when this counterculture had yet to acquire the “hippie” label, to a lot of young scene-makers it seemed the party marked the beginning of something entirely new – and unknown. Farren again: “Nobody could quite define it. There were a lot of mods there who immediately went out and dyed their suits funny colours, metaphorically speaking. Everyone was thinking, ‘Yeah, this is it’, if we could just figure out what ‘it’ was.”

Others take a less romantic view of the launch’s cultural significance – including Miles: “We were just having a party. I mean, it was a good one, a really good one, but I don’t think anyone thought it was going to change the world.” Even so, it would be hard to deny that the scene that coalesced around the IT launch had many lasting effects on British culture.

Pink Floyd and Soft Machine were both still unsigned at the time but both went on to become hugely influential outfits. “It was a dance so you had to have live music,” deadpans Miles. “Pink Floyd received £15 because they had a light show, Soft Machine got £12, though they did have a miked-up motorbike.” Robert Wyatt – Soft Machine’s drummer at the time – explains: “In those days there was no seating in the Roundhouse so there was lots of space. A friend of the organist was a motorcyclist and, as another member of the group, his contribution was to ride round the room to add a bit of enjoyable sound. He was very sensitive in the way he drove his motorbike and it fitted in with the tunes perfectly, as I remember.”

At the time of the launch, the Roundhouse was a crumbling husk that had once housed winding gear used to haul Victorian trains up the hill from Euston station. In 1964, it was bought by an organisation called Centre 42, led by the playwright Arnold Wesker and named after the trade union movement Article 42, which states that arts should be for everyone. Centre 42 planned to turn the building into a workers’ arts centre but, due to cost, these plans were shelved and it remained unused.

That it ended up in the hands of the IT crowd is due to the efforts of Jim Haynes – an American who helped to found the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and soon became a leading figure in the London underground. “Arnold Wesker had a large sign up on the outside saying they needed £250,000. We thought that was a little bit crazy. The best thing to do is to start using the facility to generate money and get things happening there. That’s what we did. I knew Arnold, so I called him up and asked if we could borrow the Roundhouse – I told a bit of a lie – I said for a small party.”

This was the first time the Roundhouse was used for live entertainment but it soon became the counterculture’s venue of choice, hosting The Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, and providing an artistic focal point for the scene. The Roundhouse has continued to operate as a venue, off and on, and reopened in June after a £29.7m redevelopment. Miles reckons the Roundhouse had an even bigger impact on London: “The whole wonder that is Camden Market developed. That area was just bleak and dead before the Roundhouse became a venue.”

And, of course, there’s The International Times. Haynes recalls: “We were all aware that the paper was going to be a success and that it was going to speak for a lot of people. The event proved just how big an audience there was.” Miles, too, could sense the importance of what the paper represented: “I certainly felt something new was happening when I held the first copy in my hands, because only Fleet Street was supposed to publish newspapers.” Notwithstanding competition from papers such as OZ and Frendz, IT remained the UK underground’s bible and bulletin-board throughout the Sixties, Seventies and into the Eighties, running a mix of political comment, cultural criticism and underground art that had a massive influence on the mainstream press. When rock writers such as Farren and Charles Shaar Murray moved out of the underground and onto titles like NME in the Seventies, they took with them their irreverent, gun-slinging approach and helped to transform the face of journalism in this country forever.

Forty years on, it’s easy to conclude that the counterculture failed in its attempt to construct a viable alternative to mainstream society, yet its influence can still be felt. If you’re at a gig, a nightclub or a rave this weekend, ask yourself just how much of it you’d be enjoying if it weren’t for that one night 40 years ago that Haynes calls “a modest little launch that went totally over the top”

“UbuWeb is pleased to announce the relaunch of the AVI’s, RealVideo and MP3s of Robert Ashley’s Music with Roots in the Aether, a seminal series of interviews and performances conceived and realized by Robert Ashley in 1976, consisting of 14 hours worth of video and audio. Subjects and performers include: David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley. Robert Ashley says: ‘Music with Roots in the Aether is a series of interviews with seven composers who seemed to me when I conceived the piece-and who still seem to me twenty-five years later-to be among the most important, influential and active members of the so-called avant-garde movement in American music, a movement that had its origins in the work of and in the stories about composers who started hearing things in a new way at least fifty years ago.'”

“Well in the last update I claimed this was done, but as you can see it isn’t still. It’s like the classic adage that it takes 90% of the time to do the last 10% of the work. Anyway the Natural Synth has three noise generators and two triple low-frequency filters. It also has a Serge negative slew module, a diode ladder filter (like the VCS3 that Yamazaki Maso aka Masonna is obsessed with), and an APSI parametric eq. It’s really good for doing fluttery and swishy sounds, like water and leaves, and other times it does squiggly squeals and labored chuffing. I built it ‘wrong’ on purpose, and it really paid off, it feeds back internally! So when you patch it above the face plate, you also have to respect the way it patches itself internally.

“I played this synth on half of LTR, and also on the forthcoming Kites/Can’t cd.”

“As much of a great guitar player as Jimi [Hendrix] was, Bert Jansch is the same thing for acoustic guitar…and my favourite…” –Neil Young

“At one point, I was absolutely obsessed with Bert Jansch. When I first heard that LP [1965], I couldn’t believe it. It was so far ahead of what everyone else was doing.” –Jimmy Page (who recorded Jansch’s ‘Blackwaterside’ as ‘Black Mountain Side’ with Led Zeppelin)

“He completely re-invented guitar playing and set a standard that is still unequalled today… There are people playing guitar who don’t even realise they’ve been influenced by him one step removed.” –Johnny Marr

Bert’s new album The Black Swan comes out in the USA and Canada on Drag City on October 17. Producer Noah Georgeson (Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart) worked with Bert on the record, as well as a number of guests including Devendra Banhart, Beth Orton, Otto Hauser (Espers, Vetiver), Helena Espvall (Espers), Kevin Barker (Currituck Co.), Paul Wassif and Adam Jansch. The album has been receiving fantastic reviews across Europe, including 5 stars from Mojo magazine.

Bert will play Thursday, October 19 at Arthur Nights at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. Other performers on the two stages that night include Devendra Banhart, Espers, Belong, Jackie Beat, Buffalo Killers, Yellow Swans, Grouper and Axolotl. Click here for ticket info.

Courtesy SOMA!

Excerpts from “Inside the Invisible Empire: My Travel with Rock ‘N’ Roll Legend Tav Falco and His Unapproachable Panther Burns” by Richard A. Pleuger (Arthur 21, March 2006):

Gustavo ‘Tav’ Falco was born into Italian roots in Gurdon, Arkansas, a sleepy railroad town between Little Rock and Texarkana, east of the Interstate on Highway 67. While driving through rural Arkansas in his 1964 Ford Thunderbird, the sight of the train tracks just outside of Bluff City, Memphis brings him back to his childhood:

“I was living out in the backwoods between Gurdon and Whelan Springs, Arkansas, a whistle stop on the railroad where the cannonball freight ran through it, way in the backwoods and not much bigger than Panther Burns in Mississippi.

“When a steam train came through, it covered the whole town in black smoke, you couldn’t see anything. It was like a fantastic mist that transported you into the netherworld of the imagination and the unconscious.

“Even today, the whole essence of the Panther Burns is to stir up the dark waters of the unconscious mind. That’s why we’re here. You can have a party, you can have sex, you can find your husband or wife—all this happens at Panther Burns shows. You can get spaced out. You can get drunk. You can lie on the floor, get stomped on. You can intermingle with the races, you can dance your ass off. But the essence of it is: stir up the unconscious mind.”

Childhood experience inspired young Tav to become a brakeman on the Missouri-Mississippi railroad, not unlike Jimmie Rodgers, the great country singer of the 1920s. In fact, in the beginning Tav and his band were billed in Memphis as Tav Falco, the Beale Street Blues Bopper and The Unapproachable Panther Burns. Later he changed it into Tav Falco, the Steppin’ Breakman and the U.P.B.

Tav: “The brakeman separates and couples the cars together. He climbs up on the car and sets the big round handbrake. He gives hand signals when to do what. A very romantic job.”

…

Tav Falco: “Around the turn of the last century—1900 or so—they started clearing more land for the cultivation of cotton and other crops around the Mississippi River. These big piles of trees and bush were left there to be burned later. And the animals that were living in these areas—foxes, bears, rabbits—had no place to go.

“There was this wild cat, a panther, who was very cunning and howled all night. Faced with the destruction of his own habitat, the panther started to raid the farmers’ chicken coops. The animal became a general nuisance. They tried to hunt the panther down, but he eluded their traps.

“One night the farmers ran the animal into a canebrake, a stand of wild cane bamboo growing there, and they set the canebrake on fire. The shrieks of the panther were so intense that it was unforgettable. The location became known from then on as The Panther Burn. In essence, it was a symbol for the downfall of the last vestige of frontier America and the onset of European civilization in the South. And this is were we derived the lore of the Panther Burn.”

….

Tav always collaborated musically with his idols. Beside playing with Chilton, Charlie Feathers and James Luther Dickinson, he had blues singer Jesse Mae Hemphill (a.k.a. Shewolf) and the marching drummers of Napoleon Strickland’s Cane Fife Band heavily destabilizing the already raucous rendition of “Bourgeois Blues” on his band’s debut album, 1981’s Behind the Magnolia Curtain. But despite the band’s impressive collective pedigree, Panther Burns was not about musical virtuosity, it’s about an aesthetic.

“To this day I regard myself more as a performer than a musician,” Tav told me in 2002. “It takes a special individual to play in the Panther Burns. You can’t just plug a musician into this music. To play this music is hard work for musicians, but easy for an artist. I would rather work with someone who’s got more of a philosophical orientation than sheer musical virtuosity to display in the band. I’m looking for something ineffable.”

…

On a cool late summer night in 1986, I went to see Tav Falco unleash his unique blend of rockabilly and country blues in a club down on Broadway. Sporting a big black curly pompadour, Tav proved to be an even more powerful performer than I could have imagined. He drove his group the Panther Burns, in his own words, like “the last steam engine train on the tracks that does nothing but run and blow.” The power of the music propelled the crowd into other realms of fierce, ritualistic reality. During the a hypnotic rendition of “Jump Suit,” Tav proclaimed: “Panthermen and Pantherwomen, this is the Invisible Empire!” The audience then stormed the stage to sing along.

Tav Falco and the Unapproachable Panther Burns perform Friday, October 20 at Arthur Nights. Click here for ticket info.