REMEMBERING

It's a week of extraordinary commemorations. Today's big news is the unveiling later this morning of finalists in the 9/11 Memorial Design competition. Families of 9/11 victims saw the designs last night in a preview at the Winter Garden across the street from Ground Zero, where a public exhibition of the designs begins today. Check the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and ImagineNY Web sites for the latest news.

Whaddya know. Eight finalists were just announced:

  • "Votives in Suspension" by Norman Lee and Michael Lewis
  • "Lower Waters" by Bradley Campbell and Matthias Neumann
  • "Passages of Light: The Memorial Cloud" by Gisela Baurmann, Sawad Brooks and Jonas Coersmeier
  • "Suspending Memory" by Joseph Karadin with Hsin-Yi Wu
  • "Garden of Lights" by Pierre David with Sean Corriel and Jessica Kmetovic
  • "Reflecting Absence: A Memorial at the World Trade Center Site" by Michael Arad
  • "Dual Memory" by Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta
  • "Inversion of Light" by Toshio Sasaki

Here's a look at the eight designs. When you click on each image, you can read about the theme of that particular design.  

Saturday's news will be the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The commemorations have already begun. Paul Krassner's latest Zen Bastard column, "Conspiracy Queen," is a tribute to a woman who spent eight years cross-referencing (without a computer) the 26 volumes of the Warren Report and ending up with more than 27,000 typewritten pages, as well as the conviction that, contrary to the report, "Lee Harvey Oswald was set up to take the fall" for the assassination.

By contrast, this week's TV specials commemorating the events in Dallas' Dealey Plaza confirm the Warren Commission Report, to the extent that they bother with it at all. Which is not surprising when you consider the excellent point that TV writer Alessandra Stanley makes: "The swirl of interviews, documentaries and specials building up to Nov. 22 are not really about the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination." They're really a self-regarding celebration of television: "the day a young, vigorous medium was swept into power and forever changed American culture and politics." Here's a roundup of the TV specials.

POSTSCRIPT: Hmm. How could I have missed this? "LBJ aides say JFK documentary a smear." A History Channel film alleges that Lyndon Johnson had a role in in the JFK assassination. Some kooks will believe anything.

November 19, 2003 10:26 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on November 19, 2003 10:26 AM.

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