The Parisian Belle Epoque Time Capsule
When
a 91-year-old woman died in 2010, her family discovered she owned an
apartment in Paris that she had abandoned in perfectly preserved—and
decorated—condition over 70 years ago.
In 2010, a 91-year-old woman died in the south of France, leaving behind an apartment in Paris. Her family tasked auctioneer Olivier Choppin-Janvry and his team with visiting the flat in the city's 9th arrondissement, near the Pigalle red-light district and the Opera Garnier, and inventorying its contents. When the unsuspecting experts unlocked the front door, they found it virtually untouched since before World War II. “There was a smell of old dust," recalled Choppin-Janvry.
This deceased owner, known in the press only as Madame de Florian, had fled the vulnerable city at the outbreak of World War II as the German offensive neared. It was 1942 and she was just 23 years old when she locked up the apartment she had inherited from her grandmother and left town. For the following 70 years, de Florian paid the rent and upkeep on the home without ever returning.
Under a thick film of grime, investigators found themselves transported to early 1900s Paris during the height of the Belle Epoque, when the city was celebrating its cultural renaissance and de Florian's grandmother was the talk of the town. Books and newspapers lined the shelves, gold curtains draped the windows, and a luxurious dressing table held hairbrushes, perfumes, and candle stubs that seemed to await the return of a very glamorous noblewoman. Against floral wallpaper and wainscoting, a stuffed ostrich draped with a shawl stood above two pre-war stuffed animals—a very retro-looking Mickey Mouse and Porky the Pig. The formal dining room, with a low-hanging chandelier over the table, wood stove, and stone sink, was still fully stocked with glassware and pots and pans.
It was, one of the inventorying experts said, like “stumbling into the castle of Sleeping Beauty.”
The biggest surprise was a never-before-seen painting by famed 19th-century Italian artist Giovanni Boldini. The subject of the portrait, a woman perched on a lounge and shrouded in a pink satin evening gown, was 24-year-old Marthe de Florian, the apartment owner’s grandmother who was a Belle Epoque socialite, theater actress, and Boldini’s muse.
Born in 1864, de Florian was a certain breed of courtesan known as les demimondaines, who were famous for their lavish lifestyles, partying ways, and strings of high-profile suitors. The mysterious woman sparked furious speculation online, as forums of fascinated readers dug through French genealogical records to uncover a little more about the family. These amateur historians surfaced old newspaper clippings and birth records showing de Florian's real name was Mathilde Heloise Beaugiron, and she worked as a seamstress and bore two children before turning to acting and the more lucrative “society girl” trade.“But, somewhere in the 9th arrondissement, a dusty flat missing a fine Boldini painting may still remain frozen-in-time.”
When the apartment’s contents were discovered, Boldini’s painting was without a signature and no records of the work were found in reference books to prove it was his. But art experts managed to locate a mention of the work in a memoir by the famed painter’s widow, and they dated the painting to 1898. Their suspicions were confirmed by a stack of love letters found in the apartment that were wrapped in different colored ribbons and scrawled in the hand of, among others, Boldini and 72nd Prime Minister George Clemenceau.
The painting went up for auction with an asking price of €253,000, and sold for €2.1 million after 10 bidders waged a war for the piece. “It was a magic moment. One could see that the buyer loved the painting; he paid the price of passion,” said Marc Ottav, the art specialist consulted about the painting’s authenticity. It was the highest price ever paid for one of Boldini’s works.
The location of Marthe de Florian’s apartment remains a mystery, as does her granddaughter’s true identity. But, somewhere in the 9th arrondissement, a dusty flat missing a fine Boldini painting may still remain frozen-in-time, offering a glimpse of life during the Belle Epoque.
Photo by The Daily Beast
Politics
02.05.14
GOP Will Force Reid to Save Obama’s Iran Policy—Over and Over Again
Dozens
of Republican senators joined Wednesday to demand that Harry Reid allow
a floor vote on a new Iran sanctions bill. If he doesn’t, they are
planning to make his life miserable.
The Obama White House has succeeded in keeping most Democrats in line against supporting quick passage of the “Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act,” which currently has 59 co-sponsors, including 13 Democrats. Reid has faithfully shelved the bill, pending the outcome of negotiations between Iran and the world’s major powers—the so-called “P5+1.”
But tomorrow, Republicans plan to respond by using an array of floor tactics—including bringing up the bill and forcing Reid to publicly oppose it—as a means of putting public pressure on Reid and Democrats who may be on the fence.
“Now we have come to a crossroads. Will the Senate allow Iran to keep its illicit nuclear infrastructure in place, rebuild its teetering economy and ultimately develop nuclear weapons at some point in the future?” 42 GOP senators wrote in a letter sent to Reid late Wednesday and obtained by The Daily Beast. “The answer to this question will be determined by whether you allow a vote on S. 1881, the bipartisan Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act, which is cosponsored by more than half of the Senate.”
The GOP letter calls on Reid to allow a vote on the bill during the current Senate work period—in other words, before the chamber’s next recess. Senate GOP aides said that until they get a vote, GOP senators are planning to use a number of procedural tools at their disposal to keep this issue front and center for Democrats. Since the legislation is already on the Senate’s legislative calendar, any senator can bring up the bill for a vote at any time and force Democrats to publicly object.
Senators can also try attaching the bill as an amendment to future bills under consideration. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been a harsh critic of Reid’s shelving of the bill, so he could demand a vote on it as a condition of moving any other legislation.
If those amendments are blocked by Reid, Senators can then go to the floor and make speech after speech calling out Reid for ignoring a bill supported by 59 senators—and calling on fence-sitting Democrats to declare their position on the bill.
“This letter is a final warning to Harry Reid that if Democrats want to block this bipartisan legislation, they will own the results of this foreign policy disaster,” one senior GOP senate aide said.Senate Republicans issue a ‘final warning’ to Harry Reid on Iran sanctions.
The Republican senators believe, based on recent polls, that the majority of Americans support moving forward with the Iran sanctions bill now. They also believe that if Reid did allow a vote, the bill would garner more than the 59 votes of its co-sponsors and that Democrats vulnerable in 2014 races would support it, pushing the vote total past a veto-proof two-thirds supermajority.
“I stand with the majority of Americans who want Iran’s illicit nuclear infrastructure dismantled before economic sanctions are lifted,” Sen. Mark Kirk, one of the bill’s sponsors, told The Daily Beast. “The American people deserve a vote on the bipartisan Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act.”
Besides McConnell and Kirk, other senators prepared to lead the effort to demand a vote on the bill include Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
The bill would do three things: reimpose existing sanctions suspended under the interim agreement if Iran cheats on its commitments; ensure that a final agreement must require Iran to dismantle its illicit nuclear infrastructure; and threaten to impose additional economic sanctions in the future should Iran cheat on its commitments or fail to agree to a final deal that dismantles its nuclear infrastructure.
During his State of the Union address last month, President Obama pledged to veto the bill if it reached his desk. Speaking with CNN’s Jake Tapper Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged the senate not to pass the measure.
“I believe it’s a mistake now to break faith with a negotiating process when you’re in the middle of the process. The United States of America agreed, together with our P5+1 allies, with Russia, China, France, Great Britain, Germany, all of them agreed that during the time we’re negotiating, we would not increase sanctions,” said Kerry. “Now, our word has to mean something, too. If we’re going to negotiate, we don’t want to be responsible for now creating a dynamic where we destroy the negotiations… so they can blame us for not getting there.”
Photo by Jim Bridges/HBO
Entertainment
02.04.14
Inside the Obsessive, Strange Mind of True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto
Nic Pizzolatto was a college writing professor who’d never penned a TV script. Now, as the creator of HBO’s revolutionary True Detective, he’s the hottest showrunner in Hollywood.
How did he do it?
When I meet Pizzolatto one recent Wednesday afternoon at a quiet Italian restaurant in Malibu, that’s the mystery I’m hoping to solve.
In my opinion, True Detective—the story of a pair of retired Louisiana cops and the sinister murder investigation that forever changed their lives—is not only one of the most riveting and provocative series I've seen in the last few years. It's one of the most riveting and provocative series I've ever seen. Period. The acting is brilliant. The plot is addictive. The allusions are rich. The philosophy is mind-bending.
And the auteur-anthology format—one writer, one director, two movie stars, and one story per season, with a beginning, middle, and end—could be revolutionary. As I wrote last month, “not every narrative is best created by committee or best told as an open-ended epic. … For a certain kind of plot-centric series, the True Detective model could alleviate some of television's muddling structural issues and liberate showrunners to take full advantage of the medium's greatest asset: time. Some characters deserve eight hours on screen. In a theater, you can't do that. On TV, you can.”
Despite being a relatively recent California transplant—he moved west in 2010—Pizzolatto, 38, looks more camera-ready than most TV writers. Grey leather jacket. Black unbuttoned henley. White undershirt. Aviators. Careful stubble. He resembles celebrity chef Rocco Di Spirito, or perhaps Tom Ford in landscape mode.
He orders the whole branzino. I get the linguine vongole con bottarga. After exchanging a few pleasantries about the weather and our respective journeys to Malibu, we finally get down to business. For the next two hours, Pizzolatto reveals the secrets of his creative process—and tells me what to expect from future episodes (and seasons) of True Detective.
Let’s start with Matthew McConaughey. As Rust Cohle, McConaughey gives what I consider the best performance of his career.
Matthew just got it—the dialogue especially, as baroque as it is. He was like, “No, no, this is the way this man talks.” And the 2012 Cohle talks differently than the 1995 Cohle. Matthew has this incredibly complicated chart of where Rust Cohle is emotionally and physically at every beat of those 17 years.
A written chart?
A map of his mental and emotional state. That’s why you notice that Cohle’s delivery in 2012 and 1995 is different. And that’s significant. If we’d had a lesser actor than Matthew playing Cohle, I would have had to rewrite the role. Not every actor can handle dialogue of this verbal complexity, and even fewer actors can understand the ideas and intentions hiding behind those verbal complexities.
But if you have thoroughbreds, let ‘em run. You don’t try to make your dialogue more common. You gauge exactly how great their skill is and you try to use that skill. To me, it would have been misuse of actors like Matthew and Woody to do something safer—to not give these guys steak to chew all the time.
Part of what I think is so interesting about True Detective is that it’s an even purer form of auteur TV than, say, Deadwood—a show that was scripted in a writer’s room and realized by multiple directors. True Detective is one writer, one director, one story per season. You control the story and tell it from beginning to end.
I was on set the entire time. I worked closely with the actors. And what’s airing are the cuts I’m very happy with. I think you can have the writer’s room and still have the auteur experience, and you can still have that auteur experience with multiple directors. But for me it was just more of a question of, do I want to spend my days in my place of interiority actually creating, or do I want to be sitting at a table talking about creating? And for the first season I was already too far ahead to bring anyone else in, and I couldn’t see a way it would help me.
I don’t know that I’ll write every episode in the future. But then again, I might. Even with what I’m writing now, I’m already at the point where a) how do I explain this to anybody else? and b) do I really want anybody else to touch this?
I take it that you’ve started to write the second season.Matthew has this incredibly complicated chart of where Rust Cohle is emotionally and physically at every beat of those 17 years.
That’s what I’m writing now. But we don’t know if we’re going to go ahead and do it.
I thought HBO was onboard.
I have a deal with them, and that doesn’t change. And I think everybody’s hope is the next thing I do with them is True Detective. But if I write scripts that nobody likes, I don’t think we’ll be doing True Detective.
I just don’t take anything for granted. I made True Detective like it was going to be the only thing I ever made for television. So put in everything and the kitchen sink. Everything. You have to be able to enjoy it as a rollicking story with compelling, authentic characters, but if you can enjoy it on that level, it can just keep going. There are multiple associations, multiple layers. It was madness. It was just crazy. I’d work for 48 hours at time and then I’d sleep for 20 hours.
Why were you so possessed?
It’s like, you got one shot, man. Don’t you want to swing for the fences? And in an industry like this, it’s one kind of heartbreaking if something is exactly what you wanted and people don’t connect to it. But it’s a much greater heartbreak if something doesn’t end up how you wanted it to be and then people don’t connect to it. Because then you’re like, “What am I even doing?”
You were really haunted by that idea.
I’ve talked to other showrunners. If there’s one who’s more involved, I haven’t heard of it. For my sanity’s sake I’m going to have to think of a way to pull back. I was having conversations in my head 24 hours a day. I had Maggie and Marty and Rust in my head 24 hours a day.
***
You came into television as a novelist. Was writing something you always wanted to do?Sort of. I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.
What shows did you watch?
When I was a very little kid, we didn’t have cable. So we had three channels. I remember the stuff that was most inspiring to me as a kid, that I would actually sit down and watch, was a lot of the stuff from the Golden Age. They would rerun it at night. It might be on PBS. I’m not quite sure where, but I remember seeing a couple of Playhouse 90s. And the Twilight Zone and The Untouchables would get rerun. But I was a visual artist for a long time before I even took up writing. That’s how I got to go to college.
Painting?
Painting and drawing. A lot of it was narrative-based, sequential art. But I’m an autodidact film buff. I always had the rhythms and the language in my head.
What I could never stand, though, was the idea of putting your heart and soul into something, then having somebody else screw it up. Handing it over. It sounds like a nice way to make money, but I wouldn’t do it with anything I genuinely cared about as an artist.
Why didn’t you go straight into television?
The idea of doing something like that for a guy with my class background? It’s ludicrous. You might as well say you want to be a movie star.
Tell me about your class background.
Just growing up in south Louisiana, going to state school for college, and working two jobs. I spent four years bartending in Austin. I never had any money or any window into the world of TV.
So how did you break in?
One of the things with writing is that you don’t need money to do it, and you don’t need other people to do it. You just need paper and a pen. And if you can learn how to do it well enough…
How did you learn?
In 2004, I was in grad school, and Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos were all on HBO. Those shows were actually filling my hunger for fiction as an audience more than the contemporary fiction that I was reading. They seemed very much like auteur works—but the auteur works of a writer, not the auteur works of a director. Then I learned what a showrunner was and I was like, “Wow, that actually sounds like the perfect job for me.” But the idea of getting to do it was just silly, so I stuck with what I knew and just kept going with that.
You mean writing fiction.
I was working on the stories that would become my collection. When that got no attention, it was like starting back at square one. I had a novel that I had written for the same publisher that I pulled from publication. Then I wrote my novel Galveston in about three months, when my wife was in the last trimester of pregnancy. That was a breakthrough for me.
It must have been tough to give up on the other book, though.
Yeah, but spending two years on the bad one taught me how to write Galveston. With Galveston, I wanted to write a book that I wanted to read. And the lesson there was that it came much easier. It felt truer and more real, and the response was much more immediate.
How did TV enter the picture?
At a conference in Aspen I ran into some people in the TV business. I’d never met anyone who did TV professionally at that point. So I was like, “How do you break into TV?” And they said, “If you write a really good spec script and a really good pilot script for a show, then you can start to get work in this business.” After the conference, I told my wife that the first chance I got to speak to somebody from Los Angeles, I was going to move us out there and we were going to be in the film and TV business and I was not going to be a professor anymore. I knew I could do it.
So you had this idea in your heard from earlier, from watching Deadwood…
That I should be doing this. I could not only make the scripts, I could manage the show and make sure that we ended up with what the scripts were. That’s where a lot of stuff goes off the rails: you start out with something and what you get on the screen is not at all what you started with.
A year later Galveston got published, and it was optioned for very little money. But I got to talk to two agents finally—the agents who had done the option. And they were like, “Do you have any ideas for shows?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ve got 30 ideas for shows.” And they were like, “Well, you should write some screenplays—have you ever written a screenplay?” And I was like, “No.” And I could tell that they maybe weren’t taking me very seriously. Every novelist they option a novel from, the novelist then asks how he gets to write the script. And they say, “Well, write us some scripts.” And then maybe months go by and they never hear anything.
But before a week was out I’d already sent them two scripts—a spec script and a pilot. I wrote one in two days and one in three days.
This was in the summer of 2010. You ended up writing six scripts that summer.
Six TV scripts. Three pilots for original shows, one of which was True Detective.
Where did True Detective start for you? What was the first germ of the idea?
Probably May or June of 2010, when I was working on what I wanted my next novel to be. I wanted it to be really big. I was going to use certain conventions of the procedural crime novel—and I don’t say those things with any kind of haughtiness. I love these conventions. I love them. I love a good plot. But I wanted to use them to try to write a literary police novel that also kind of encapsulated 17 years in the life of South Louisiana.
You were doing a lot of writing.
I guess. But a lot of it was desperate. I really wanted to change my life. Having a kid made me serious about my life in a way that I hadn’t been before.
You felt like you were complacent before?
Yeah. I wasn’t serious. I had no stake in the world, so my ambitions tended to be tamped down because at the end of the day I didn’t give a shit.
Teaching wasn’t your great ambition.
No. That’s just one of those things that you fall into, really, because it’s the only thing you’re trained for.
So you’re accustomed to disappointment.
Oh yeah. Thirty years worth, baby.
Is it frustrating when people assume that your success is a sudden thing?
I just feel I need to put an asterisk there. There were 30 years of Chef Boyardee and no money that none of you are hearing about. And then years of being a published writer who just goes unnoticed. There were those years, too.
Was that hard? The idea that you put so much time and energy into something that not many people even read?
Yeah. I don’t think art is about expression. I don’t think that’s its primary motive. The primary motivation is communion with your fellow human beings. So it’s very frustrating to make something and nobody notices it. If you put on a play and nobody comes to it, did you really put on a play? But you just keep going. You remind yourself that people have been doing this as long as there have been people. And your frustrations and disappointments are nothing new. And you go back to the wheel.
Do you think part of the reason why television had so much appeal for you was that you knew you’d be able to reach an audience? Everyone has a TV in the living room. Not everyone reads literary novels.
That’s a great point. I think, with myself, growing up in rural Louisiana but having TV—TV jumps all these class boundaries. For a kid to even have a disposition to be willing to sit down and read literary fiction and not regard it as a waste of time—that requires a certain amount of cultural influence and education. But TV sneaks in, no matter what. I really like that. And the idea that you could put your heart and soul and every bit of yourself into it, the same way you could a novel, and stay there and make sure it was done right? That was all appealing.
When you wrote the True Detective pilot, did you know it was the one?
Yeah. I just held onto it until I knew enough and could make it the way I wanted to. I had producers who wanted to buy the format. There is a way you could franchise it. You really could. You could have True FBI, True DA. Like Law & Order, just using the dual interrogation format to tell a story. But I wouldn’t sell it.
The jackpot hit when Matthew McConaughey read the script and said, “I want to do this.” Then we were all off to the races.
***
What can you reveal about episode four, which is airing on Sunday?Episode four is the beginning of Act Two. Suddenly, the rhythm of the entire show changes. The slow part is over now. The first three episodes move at a very deliberate, almost funereal cadence, like you’re marching toward something. And what you’re marching toward is that final image in episode three.
Of Reggie Ledoux in his underwear.
Right. Then in episodes four, five, and six, the rhythm is much more varied. They’re like children. I love them all for different reasons. But five for me is like the most special of the children. Then seven and eight are the third act—and the less said about that, the better.
I will say this: if someone likes True Detective after three episodes, I can guarantee we didn’t drop the ball. And if you don’t like it based on the first three episodes, you should stop now. Plenty of other stuff on TV.
I’m sure that’s what HBO wants you to say.
[Laughs.]
Did you know from the beginning how Season One would end?
I knew what the last scene was. I wasn’t entirely sure how we were going to get ourselves there, but I knew what it was. And if the last scene had to change because the characters revealed something to me, then it would change. But actually the last scene is the last scene that was always intended to be.
I’ve enjoyed reading people theorize about what’s going to happen because it’s a sign that you’re connecting. But I’m also sort of surprised by how far afield they’re getting. Like, why do you think we’re tricking you? It’s because you’ve been abused as an audience for more than 20 years. The show’s not trying to outsmart you. And really if you pay attention… if someone watches the first episode and really listens, it tells you 85 percent of the story of the first six episodes.
I imagine the Hart and Cohle story is over at the end of Act Three, though.If someone likes True Detective after three episodes, I can guarantee we didn’t drop the ball. And if you don’t like it based on the first three episodes, you should stop now. Plenty of other stuff on TV.
Yeah. But I retain the literary rights to them. I could always go and write some Cohle and Hart novels. [Laughs]
You’ve said before that you don’t care about serial killers, and yet you’ve created a very compelling narrative around one.
I think my serial killer’s personal pathology is wrapped in very culturally relevant symbols that may not be immediately apparent. Not just hunting, but the idea of woman as trophy to be stuffed and displayed. The idea of prayer, and one of the necessities of the prayer pose being the blindfold: in order to effectively pray you’re going to have to ignore some very basic facts about the world.
So to me it’s not just that Cohle and Hart are hunting for their savage id or their most destructive portion. It’s that the killer has some resonance in the kinds of shows we’re talking about. We only have the one murdered woman at the crime scene in the entire series. It’s not an unrelenting horror show. It’s meant to stand in for the universal victim in this type of drama. Because while I think we’re doing a good job of telling the story that this genre demands, I think we’re also poking certain holes in it and looking at where these instincts begin, both in the type of men that Hart and Cohle represent—and in ourselves as an audience.
What’s an example of that?
Episode Five. I’ve just read a couple pieces where the critic tries to dismiss Cohle’s monologues as “the sort of half-baked loopiness you’d get in freshman year philosophy,” and that’s not true at all. If you pay attention to Cohle’s philosophies they’re actually much deeper and more nuanced and grounded in legitimate scientific and philosophical thought than some asshole getting stoned and talking about the meaning of life.
So in episode five—not to spoil anything—Cohle gives one of his metaphysical addresses. And you can see it as Job crying out to an uncaring God—or you could see it as a character trapped in a TV show yelling at the audience. I think that much, at least, is safe to print.
Did you ever get any pressure to cut McConaughey’s monologues? Some critics have complained about them.
Yeah. I was told that we needed to get rid of the monologues and make True Detective more like one of the shows that everyone was saying we were like before we premiered. And I just said no: that’s not the show we set out to make. This isn’t CSI: Louisiana. This isn’t Law & Order: McConaughey and Harrelson. What you’re describing is not something I will allow my name to be on. And I think you have to be willing to do that. I have a choice between seeing something done wrong or making an enemy, introduce me to my new enemy. You have to be diplomat and fighter.
Is it hard writing the second season after putting everything and the kitchen sink into the first?
Now I feel like I’m in a really sweet spot where I can really go nuts. Like, I bought myself some credibility. One of my goals for Season Two is more authentic, faster—and stranger. It’s going to get stranger.
I’ll be honest, though: if I get to do this two more times, I could see calling it a day. Because I basically have to reinvent the wheel every new season. Every first episode is a pilot. I’ve got to win people over again.
Has it been challenging to create a new character who can stand toe to toe with Cohle?
I got him.
You do?
That’s when I start to know when I’m off to the races—when I’m in love again. And it’s not in love with an idea. I’m in love with a character. A character just did something on a page that made me sit up and go, “Now you’re becoming a dimensional human being to me, and I’m interested.”
When did that happen with Cohle?
With Cohle it happened almost instantly, when I was writing his voice. He was describing that crime scene and what they found, and I’m going along with him. And then his partner decides, for whatever reason, that this is a good time to invite him to dinner. And then the voice tells me that he says “OK.” But he’s thinking about his own daughter, and Hart’s wife and kids, and he knows maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but there’s nothing he can do: “I’m gonna have a drink.” And I remember writing that freehand and going, “OK. Interested in YOU.” I’ll let this guy keep talking and see what else he tells me.
Tell me about the character you’re excited about for Season Two.
I’ve got three characters I like, actually.
And they’re nothing like Rust Cohle?
I have lived for two years with this show. Now that it’s out, I’m able to look back on and think, “God that was crazy. What was I thinking?” If I had know the sheer amount of work that would have been entailed, I would have been like, “Fuck yeah, I need a couple of other writers, a good supervising producer, I need this, I need that…”
And yet you’re doing it the same way again.
Yeah, because I have to live up to Season One. Because people liked it. It would be a different story if nobody had noticed True Detective, or if it just had a small cult following. But in order to make the second season as full and dense and rich as the first … I don’t know any other way to do it. So I think I’m going to have to do it again.
Photo by John Biever/Getty
02.06.14
Seahawks-Broncos and 7 Other Thrilling Super Bowl Matchups
From Joe Montana’s march to David Tyree’s helmet catch.
Super Bowl V
Super Bowl V was an ugly game. It was close and hard fought but the game between the Baltimore Colts and the Dallas Cowboys set the Super Bowl record for most turnovers with the teams combining to give up the ball 11 times. Baltimore alone turned the ball over seven times, including four fumbles, while Dallas committed ten penalties for 133 yards. The game went down to the final seconds though when the Colts still triumphed 16-13 on a 32-yard field goal by rookie kicker Jim O’Brien, who previously had an extra point blocked earlier in the game. It was a tense matchup that made up in suspense for what it lacked in aesthetics.
Super Bowl XXIII
“Hey, isn’t that John Candy?” With three minutes left in Super Bowl XXIII, down a field goal and stuck on their own eight-yard line, Joe Montana got the San Francisco 49ers to stop worrying about the game and to focus on the rotund Canadian comedian in the stands. The game featured the 49ers, one of the iconic dynasties of the 1980s against the explosive offense of the Cincinnati Bengals. Although the 49ers defense had held the Bengals without an offensive touchdown (Cincinnati only reached the endzone on a kickoff return), an inconsistent night by Niners kicker Mike Cofer—-who missed two field goals—-left San Francisco down 16-13 with 3:10 left. But Montana, after mentioning John Candy, led his team in a methodical march downfield culminating in a 10-yard strike to receiver John Taylor with 34 seconds to win.
Super Bowl XXV
The only two words anyone remembers or needs to know about Super Bowl XXV is “wide right.” As time ticked down, the Buffalo Bills, down by only one point to the New York Giants, sent out kicker Scott Norwood to go for a game winning field goal from the Giants 29-yard line with eight seconds left. The game been a closely matched back and forth game with the star running backs for both teams, Ottis Anderson for the Giants and Thurman Thomas for the Bills, each rushing for over 100 yards and a touchdown. But it would all come down to a 47-yard field goal attempt by Norwood. He missed, pushing the ball just right of the goal posts and the Giants would win the game while the Bills would start a record streak of futility, losing four consecutive Super Bowls in a row.
Super Bowl XXXIV
Kevin Dyson was less than one yard short. The Tennessee Titans had clawed back from an early 16-0 deficit against the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXIV to tie the game late in the fourth quarter. And then, after one play, the Rams went ahead on a long bomb from quarterback Kurt Warner to all-pro wide receiver Isaac Bruce to go ahead 23-16. The Titans ended up with the ball back in their hands on their 12-yard line with 1:48 to go. They need to drive 88 yards to score a touchdown and be able to force over time. Tennessee ended up able to go only 87. On the last play of the game, with six seconds left and no timeouts, quarterback Steve McNair threw a pass across the middle to wide receiver Kevin Dyson. Dyson was tackled by St. Louis linebacker Mike Jones a couple of yards shy of the end zone. The Tennessee wide receiver tried to battle through the tackle and extend his arm so that the ball could break the plain. He came up just a yard short and St. Louis won.
Super Bowl XXXVI
The New England Patriots, led by a scrappy backup named Tom Brady, were 14-point underdogs to the St. Louis Rams’ offensive juggernaut dubbed “The Greatest Show On Turf“ in Super Bowl XXXVI. The Patriots built up an early lead and were up by two touchdowns, 17-3, going into the fourth quarter but the Rams stormed back as Kurt Warner ran for one touchdown and threw for another to tie the game. With 1:30 left and no timeouts in a tie game, the Patriots got the ball back. Instead of playing for overtime, Brady coolly led the Pats down the field to the St. Louis 30. There, with seven seconds left, Brady spiked the ball to set up a field goal attempt by the Patriots’ star kicker Adam Vinateri. The kick was good and not only did the Patriots avoid overtime, it became the first time ever that a winning score in a Super Bowl was on the final play of the game.
Super Bowl XLII
The New England Patriots came into Super Bowl XLII, an undefeated 18-0 team that was poised to be the greatest in NFL history. Their competition was a hot New York Giants team, which had won three road playoff games as a wild card to secure a spot in the big game. The Patriots had bested the Giants in the last game of the regular season but they would not be able to do so again. Big Blue put together a last minute drive highlighted by “the helmet catch,” the spectacular effort by backup wide receiver David Tyree to catch a desperation pass against his helmet with less than a minute left. The play, which went for 32-yards changed the momentum of the game and placed the Giants deep in Patriots territory with less than a minute left. Four plays and 20 seconds later, the Giants scored to go up 17-14, which would be their final margin in their astonishing upset win.
Super Bowl XLVII
Super Bowl XLVII looked it was going to be a blowout. The Baltimore Ravens were crushing the San Francisco 49ers early in the third quarter. Then, the lights went out. The blackout, which lasted for 22 minutes and delayed the game for over an half hour, marked a major turning point in the game. After power was restored the Superdome, the 49ers scored 17 unanswered points, narrowing Baltimore’s margin down to five. The game went down to a safety punt return as time ran out, after Baltimore punter Sam Koch strategically took a safety to run the clock down to four seconds, wagering that the improvement in field position would be worth giving up two points. That calculation was correct. San Francisco returner Ted Ginn was tackled after the game clock expired on the return and the Baltimore Ravens had won by a score of 34-31.
Michael Moynihan
02.05.14
Breaking: Jihadis Still Hate Art
They haven't gone away. If you draw the Prophet or insult his teachings, you might wind up dead
Man, those were the days, when many mobilized in defense of free speech and many more intellectuals and politicians went weak-kneed in the face of threats, deciding that the threat of murder and mob violence was reason enough to caution against “abusing” certain rights. It’s so 2006 to draw a cartoon of Mohammad and retreat to a cabin in Saskatchewan, change your name, and travel with a security detail because you think superstition deserves mockery. Those days are gone, aren’t they? I mean, everyone’s gotten over it—that low, dishonest, and utterly stupid decade—when cartoons (cartoons!) turned people into bloodthirsty psychopaths.
Well, not really.
We were reminded of the bad old days in January when American halfwit Colleen “Jihad Jane” LaRose, whose career path forked at meth addict and amateur Salafist, was sentenced to ten years for plotting for kill Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist whose entire body of work (like his breathtaking sculpture “Nimis”) has been supplanted by a pen-and-ink drawing of Muhammad as a dog. And we were reminded on Tuesday, when Swedish police rushed to Vilks’ house and cordoned off the area after a suspicious package was found on his lawn (it was a voltage meter left by an electrician).
Or a few months ago and a few miles south of Vilks, when 18-year-old Palestinian Danish poet Yahya Hassan, a critic of religious radicalism, was beaten in a Copenhagen train station for his denunciations of Islamic extremism. After he read a poem on Danish public television, Hassan received a modest 27 death threats from “offended” viewers. Too dumb to argue, they are rather eager to decapitate.
Had you switched on the BBC's Newsnight last week, you might have seen Jeremy Paxman interviewing an unknown illustrator, his voice and face anonymized by distortion, pixelation and shadow, about his innocuous drawing of “Jesus and Mo.” And what was the news hook here? Well, Maajid Nawaz, a former extremist turned parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats, tweeted the “Jesus and Mo” image, attracting the usual mix of opprobrium from supposed moderates and death threats from touchy radicals.
This is small beer compared to events in Tunisia, that first domino to fall in the Arab Spring era, where illustrator Jabeur Mejri was arrested and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in jail for posting drawings of Muhammad on Facebook. In a country freshly liberated from the authoritarianism of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Mejri and his friend Ghazi Beji, both strident atheists, were convicted of “transgressing morality, defamation and disrupting public order.” Mejri was granted asylum in Sweden last week, though will not be released until a presidential pardon is granted.
Way back in 2006, we were engaged in two wars in the Muslim world, the issue of jihadism still mattered and fired the average American. But we’ve retreated from Afghanistan and Iraq, have a president often at odds with the Israeli government, and a military that avoided direct intervention in Syria and Libya, but the problem of hyper-religious ratbags persists. We just pay less attention now. Because still, no American publisher will touch the memoir of Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned the infamous “Muhammad cartoons” in Denmark, because of his demand that those life-changing cartoons be included in any printing. Still South Park wouldn’t be allowed to show Muhammad in bear costume, as they tried unsuccessfully to do in 2010.
It continues. Because it works. And I recommend the Islamist tactic to all of those people who clot Twitter, complaining about columnists and bloggers who have “offended” them: consistently and loudly threaten to kill them for their transgressions. Periodically make good on your promise. And no one will ever offend you again.
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