Media and custom pages

So, I’d like to have a homepage with it’s own PHP file, and a more advanced layout than the rest of the pages. You know the kind of thing – a list of the latest posts, a slideshow of pictures, the blocks arranged in a different order, etc.

Now what I want in particular is to be able to attach a list of media to the page, so I can run a query and fetch them.

I could:

1. “attach” them to the page, but there seems to be no way to unattach them (and I’d want to be able to add & remove stuff from the slideshow, obviously!)
2. use/write a plugin to add taxonomy to media items, and filter on a tag, or
3. do something else, that I haven’t thought of!

Is there a “normal” way to do this? Thanks for your help.