billboard and hoarding

Though the ways advertising space is appraised these days might be somewhat transformed, I think we can all be nostalgic over Messy Nessy Chic’s appreciation of the faded art of hand-drawn artisanal signage with its distinctive type-faces.
Though it’s only an echo of the craft, we’re often treated to ghost signs or brickads preserved on the façades of older buildings after the business has long since disappeared or the nice, bold penmanship of daily menus written on blackboard easels on the sidewalks before cafes and restaurants. There are a few professionals who still ply the aesthetic but I am hoping that there’s a bigger revival.

gene-pool

Once considered lost with just a few male members observed who’d not yet been informed that their species had gone extinct, the kakapo (though with many challenges still ahead) are slowly making a recovery, the population having been sequestered on a remote island off the coast of New Zealand. The turkey-sized flightless and fearless parrots, having evolved over the millennia with no natural predators suffered terribly with the arrival of Europeans, who brought with them hitchhiking pests like cats and rats, that hunted the birds to the brink of extinction, like many other charismatic creatures.
The rescue scheme of the New Zealanders, involving the eradication of invasive species on otherwise inaccessible islands and transplanting threatened populations there to recover, has been a successful one for this and other feathered friends, but what’s really remarkable in the case of the kakapos is that a consortium of researchers have taken advantage of this success-story, with the total number of individuals having grown to a meagre but manageable one hundred and twenty-five, to sequence the DNA of an entire species, and not just some select exemplars. Of course, this sampling is not characteristic of a normally viable and genetically diverse population, but the significance and what knowing all the subtle differences in health, vitality, mutations and foibles that make each of the subjects (and us as well) unique is something heretofore unexplored—and suggests potential for further understanding about the mechanics of evolution and perhaps gives the conservators the chance to play match-maker.

separation, alignment, cohesion

Photography editor Alan Taylor of The Atlantic shares a select gallery of oddly satisfying and soothing images that illustrate the Chinese art of precision crowd formation. There’s no element of the mob to these carefully coordinated scenes, which in most cases broke the records (some of the aspirations are unusual) that they set out to break and raised the bar for the next gathering.

swan song or pangloss

As classical and liturgical music has done a good job of preserving Latin—and how antique sounding constructs are fossilised in Christmas carols, some ethnographically-minded composers are doing what they know best in order to try to help save some snatches of the estimated three-thousand languages that are threatened the vanish or become moribund over the next century.
The New York Times has fascinating coverage of this global collaboration, which does not aim to set obscure and unintelligible speech to music necessarily but rather transform them into music. Sadly, many of the resulting compositions are dirges as the quarry and quiver available to linguists is limited and the world is a bit poorer for the loss of the last native speakers of Bawm, Karaim, Chamling, Faroese, Istriot or Manx. Languages have always been subject to extinction but a few dominant languages and mass communication have accelerated the process and lingual diversity has probably never been so meagre since before the Tower of Babel. Some creative minds, nonetheless, are employing interesting and hopeful strategies to promote learning, curiosity and perhaps conservancy. The European Day of Languages (all two hundred twenty-five of them), promoting plurilingualist, is observed on 26 September and UNESCO celebrates International Mother Language Day on 21 February but any day is a good day to safeguard a rarity by any means at one’s disposal.