James Dean made his television—and professional acting—debut on this date in 1950. He was 19 years old, and he was one of several young people seen in a live, minute-long TV ad for Pepsi-Cola.
The young people are at a party, and Dean puts money in the player piano, as seen in the photo at top. The piano doesn’t work and Dean “fixes” it.
The ad (after the jump);
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Guglielmo Marconi reported the successful reception of the first transatlantic radio signal on this date in 1901. He had built a station in Cornwall, the far southwest of England, and then traveled to Canada, to a far eastern point in Newfoundland called Signal Hill. (In the photo at top, Marconi is seen on the left directing his associates as they raise a kite with an antenna attached. They are atop Signal Hill.)
The message, three repeated clicks, which is Morse code for the letter S, was sent from the Cornwall transmitter at an appointed time, and, at that appointed time, something—one click or was it three? You heard it, too, right?—something was heard at Signal Hill. At the time of the transmission, the entire route was in sunlight.
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A few years ago I wrote about two artists who played with the question of whether what they are depicting is anything more or less than words on a page or paint on a surface. Both the poet George Herbert and the painter Arcimboldo make art of the question, What is art? Is it what it depicts, an idea about what it depicts, both at the same time (which makes it a third option), or something less than? Is art, by definition, always a misfire, in that a depiction of a thing is not the thing and never can be?
Arcimboldo painted portraits of character types rather than individuals; for instance, a librarian composed entirely of books or a gardener made of vegetables in a bowl. That latter painting depends on the viewer to decide to see the bowl filled with veggies or a human “face.”
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