Canned Heat and the Brady Bunch

There I was, in post-lunch early-Sunday-afternoon lotusland, when I saw it:


[“Goodbye, Alice, Hello,” The Brady Bunch, November 24, 1972. Click for a larger view. Watch the episode here.]

That’s the Canned Heat album Future Blues (released August 3, 1970). Canned Heat on The Brady Bunch !

What’s going on here: Marcia has left the record player running all night. Carol is tidying up when she hears the noise of the needle in the run-out groove. The prop people must have had a copy of Future Blues and decided to have some fun. See what they’ve done to the cover? The Best of Marching Bands. The only other explanation I can devise is that Marcia Brady was a secret Canned Heat fan, forced to hide her taste for boogie music from her hopelessly square family. You decide what’s more plausible.

Future Blues is a great Canned Heat album, rivaled only by Hooker ’n Heat, the band’s 1970 collaboration with John Lee Hooker. The inverted flag is a distress signal. Here it signals ecological catastrophe, a source of deep woe for Alan Wilson, the Heat’s resident genius.



I’ve been a Canned Heat fan forever. I got my Future Blues signed in 2010.

*

June 15, 2015: I’ve corrected the spelling of Marcia’s name.

A related post
Canned Heat in Illinois

[That’s Bob “The Bear” Hite in the orange suit. I wonder if The Bear knew that Carol Brady’s hand was all over his yas-yas-yas. That album on the chair? The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street. ]

Helping Harvey Mandel

On a more serious Canned Heat-related note: the guitarist Harvey Mandel is fighting cancer. His sister Rose Mandel is raising money to cover the cost of multiple surgeries: Help Harvey Mandel.

[Harvey Mandel played and recorded with Canned Heat in 1969 and 1970 and rejoined in 2009. Here’s a sample, from the Woodstock festival.]

Recently updated

Dropbox and the plain style The plain style may inspire too much trust. It’s smart to opt out of Dropbox’s arbitration procedures.

A Big Lots tip

Coming soon, perhaps, to a Big Lots near you: Staedtler Extruded Eraser Sticks, black or white, six for $3. The best part, as described on the back of the package: “Extruded Mars head runs through eraser core.” The god of war himself, at your fingertips.

Too many erasers? No. I will quote my dad on stationery matters: “It is better to be oversupplied than undersupplied.”

My dad on supplies

I told my dad about our visit this morning to Staples, where we bought more (still more) index cards — enough, I said, to last into the next century. Quoth my dad: “It is better to be oversupplied than undersupplied.”

That’s the best thinking about supplies I’ve ever heard.

Related reading
From the Museum of Supplies

[As a regular reader of Orange Crate Art probably knows, supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Charles Ives’s workroom

On display in Manhattan, Charles Ives’s workroom, complete with pencil sharpener and shavings.

An -itis I have known

Speaking of -itises: have you heard of rhinitis medicamentosa? I contended with that -itis this week, after using Afrin for several days. So I tried taking two Benadryl and two Sudafed before going to sleep, and I woke up feeling fine. And now I know that nasal sprays can be dangerous toys, especially when used correctly. No more nasal sprays, ever.

I am not a medical doctor, nor do I play one on the Internets. This post is a matter of anecdote not advice, with a fleeting reference to Joan Crawford.

Overheard

“I went to the doctor — I have some kind of -itis.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Handwritten Bresson

[This story is true. I present it as it is, unadorned.]


[Dear Mother, I am in the M prison.]

Based on a memoir by André Devigny, Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) tracks the plotting of Resistance fighter Fontaine (François Leterrier) to escape from a Gestapo-run prison. Like the three other Bresson films I’ve seen, A Man Escaped has moments of handwriting. And like the other three, the film is completely compelling.

Related posts
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Diary of a Country Priest
Pickpocket

[The film’s title in French: Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, ou Le vent souffle où il veut : A condemned man escaped, or The wind blows where it will. The translations in this post are mine.]

iPads, iPods, Pat Quinn

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, speaking about the creation of a digital-manufacturing lab in Chicago: “When iPads came along and iPods, they helped transform music.” And so too, this initiative will help transform manufacturing.

Okay. But have iPads and iPods transformed music? No. Nor did they arrive in that order. It’s iTunes and the iPod (the app is older) that have transformed the music business. Repeat after me, Governor: “When iTunes and the iPod came along, they helped transform the music business.”

Shouldn’t a governor know such stuff?