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.