But first: A few thoughts on last night's Mad Men

For a few weeks, I’ve been compiling some Mad Men-iana for the blog — notes and sources and photos, with an eye toward exploring the first few years of the ’60s as they played out in Detroit. Because the perfectly constructed, jewel-like ’60s of Mad Men is the ’60s of Manhattan white-collar professionals and WASPy suburban New York, and its not-WASPy characters and elements — the Jewess Rachel Mencken, the Draper’s maid Carla, even the specter of Dust Bowl Dick Whitman — are there to remind us of the worlds outside of Mad Men’s own orbit. It’s not a fault of the show. But in so many places, like Big Labor, blue collar, black middle class Detroit, the ’60s were experienced differently.

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Deer friend

There is nothing unusual about a deer, I know. They are so populous we need to issue licenses to kill them every year — for their own good. The drive from the southeast corner of Michigan to the western coast of the lake in Wisconsin is measured in deer corpses on the highway shoulder. Most people I know have shot a deer, hit a deer with their car or know someone who has, can dress a deer, eats deer, or once stumbled over a garbage can stuffed with a deer’s carcass whilst playing football in the street.

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En route

… to Milwaukee – America’s German Athens. It’s our own little Oktoberfest, in which we enjoy the fall foliage along the I94 corridor, perpetrate merriment, visit the Golden Goat Bridge at Apple Holler, brunch heartily and commune with the spirit of the celebrated Captain Pabst.

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About this weekend: Vicente Fox is here.

This weekend, Detroit celebrates the grand opening of The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato, a world-premiere exhibition of 36 corpses that were naturally mummified in their tombs about 100 years ago. The exhibition at the Detroit Science Center — aggressively promoted as a highly educational experience — will delve into mummy science, forensics and facial reconstructions and Mexican culture and death lore.

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Richard Barnes: Museums, mortality and eternal return

On Sunday we went to Richard Barnes’s lecture on Animal Logic, his installation at the Cranbrook Institute of Science (part of the Artology series, a collaboration presenting “visual and experiential examples of the ways in which art and science frequently parallel or complement each other,” which will hold over creative-types while the Cranbrook Art Museum is closed for renovations).

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