detroit five

museums!



this is motown studio a, where every motown hit was recorded up to1971. magic! the instruments are reportedly all original, although i doubt benny benjamin had his drums set up that way. if you're ever indetroit, absolutely go to the motown museum, it is amazing.


the henry ford is a giant, awesome museum in dearborn. it's the biggest museum i've ever been to, and though it's centered arounda massive car collection, it's got tons of other stuff too. lots of american cultural history and ephemera. this is the car j.f.k. was shot in. what's kind of strange is that from the other perspective, this car is sitting in frontof a giant neon sign from the early days of mcdonalds; it seems like it would demand a more solemn presentation, but that's in keeping with this museum's delightfully morbid bent.


it doesn't stop there. here's the car reagan was getting into when he wasshot. in fact, the bullet that hit him ricocheted off the car's bulletproof glass and into reagan's chest.


just in case you thought this museum couldn't go any further, here is the main event: the chair lincoln was sitting in at ford's theatre when john wilkes booth shot him. i never would have expected a rocking chair!


ahh, this is cool. read about it below.


why can't we just make these again? that's a sweet-looking car.


here's another cool thing the henry ford museum had: one of r. buckminister fuller's dymaxion houses. here's a video of fuller introducing his design. "we are living in a spheroidal universe, around a spheroidal world, not a cubical sugarlump."

here's the ceiling at the national arab-american museum in dearborn, michigan. this is a really nice new museum. i was the only person there on a friday morning. 33% of dearborn's residents are of arab ancestry, the highest percentage of any sizable american city.

. . . yep.

by the way, did it seem odd to you that there was a rear top on the kennedy car? it seemed weird to me, and i heard other people at the museum say the same thing. i just decided to look it up now, and it seems the car was revamped and rearmored after kennedy's assassination, and was used by johnson, nixon, ford and carter before being retired. how weird! it seems like as president, for any number of reasons, you wouldn't want to drive around in the car a former president had been assassinated in.