Annals of Bad Taste

February 20, 2004 10:08 AM

Rejected 9/11 Memorial Designs are now online. All 5,201 of them. My favorite is the apple on a spike. Some question the taste of designs that use ghostly jet planes, pez dispenser-like structures or giant red question marks as motifs. Luminaries such as the inventor of the artificial heart and Marky Mark participated. Maybe there's an overlooked work of genius in here. Or maybe not.
posted by Slagman (17 comments total)

Annals of Bad Taste? Not all of them, I like this one (semi-self link - friends'). But some of those are just sad.
posted by tomplus2 at 10:31 AM on February 20, 2004

Metafilter: WHY did that?
posted by blindcarboncopy at 10:33 AM on February 20, 2004

Man, that ghostly jet planes one freaked me the hell out. On Preview: LOL carbon.
posted by fletchmuy at 10:35 AM on February 20, 2004

I like Tom Otterness's design a lot...there really are some good ones here.
posted by amberglow at 10:47 AM on February 20, 2004

Man, that would be horribly depressing for anybody to look at every day, amberglow.
posted by callmejay at 10:58 AM on February 20, 2004

actually I don't think it would be...he has little figures like that in the subways (14th and 8th has a ton of them,) and they're very endearing. I didn't get the size, but it seemed like it would only be about 10 or 20 stories tall too, so it would be a relatively small figure dwarfed by the skyscrapers anyway.
posted by amberglow at 11:32 AM on February 20, 2004

Ok, I was picturing it looming over lower Manhattan.
posted by callmejay at 11:43 AM on February 20, 2004

The Pez one looks like something from FLCL.
posted by hughbot at 1:57 PM on February 20, 2004

I wonder why there are missing numbers? Are there other boards that they didn't post for some reason?
posted by smackfu at 3:22 PM on February 20, 2004

maybe some were copies of others?
posted by amberglow at 3:30 PM on February 20, 2004

What's cool is you can click in for close-ups. For example, if look closely, the big red heart has an inscription, "God shed his tears on thee."
posted by Slagman at 3:48 PM on February 20, 2004

By the way, here's a fact: At least twice as many women, children and other civilians have died in Iraq and Afghanistan from U.S. fire than died on Sept. 11.
posted by Slagman at 3:54 PM on February 20, 2004

Here's another fact: my cat's breath smells like cat food.
posted by smackfu at 4:45 PM on February 20, 2004

and yet another fact: obsessed people introduce their obsession into every unrelated field they can.
posted by Busithoth at 4:49 PM on February 20, 2004

Not unrelated, but not necessary either.
posted by Hildago at 5:41 PM on February 20, 2004

I think The Weeping Willow is a good idea.
posted by azazello at 10:16 PM on February 20, 2004

There are no monuments those folks, that's all. My thinking about what happened that day (I live in NY) and how it has evolved from a time of true, raw emotion to one of sentimentality, is bound up in all of that and in some of what is in these memorials.
I actually think the memorial we'll have is plain enough to encompass not only what happened in NY but the violent karmic cycle it was part of and will foster. We oppress them, they bomb us again, we retaliate, etc.
posted by Slagman at 11:31 PM on February 20, 2004