The intro to Blondie’s “Picture This;” an impulse online-shopping orgy; affordable housing data.

I’m All Lost In… what I’m obsessing over THIS week.

#18

I finally took up William Wordsworth’s epic memoir poem, The Prelude, again. It’s the final section of the Penguin Classics’ Wordsworth collection I’ve been reading since the beginning of the new year. Thankfully, it has hooked me once more.

“W is on fire” I scrawled in the margin after finishing Book Seven, Residence in London, which came with phrases such as “This Parliament of Monsters;” and narratives such as “soon I bade/Farewell for ever to the private bowers/Of gowned students, quitted these, no more/To enter them, and pitched my vagrant tent,/A casual dweller and at large, among/ The unfenced regions of society./”

So, yeah, “W is on fire.” But my Wordsworth brain surge only struck, accompanied by some sharp whiskey, late in the week; too soon to tell if I’m as yet, all lost in it. I also got some tennis in at the hitting wall on Saturday morning among the crowded courts; I wisely reserved a court in advance.

But altogether, for the second week in a row, I’m disappointed to report that my usually busy inner-life is at a bit of a standstill.

Despite the brain blahs, though, I have manged to pull together this week’s list.

1) Back in Week #6 of this regular roundup, I was deep into practicing my 2023 piano set.

Here’s what I wrote, in part, last November:

The Blondie encore is a personal favorite from my 2022 set that I knew I’d be able to re-learn quickly. I added it to this current set as a cool-down after rollicking through [the first four songs].

The Blondie song I’m referring to is the band’s 1978 meta-teeny-bopper single “Picture This,” from their buoyant, sci-fi, third LP, Parallel Lines. I’ve been sitting down at my piano keyboard first thing every morning before work this week (as opposed to sitting down at my work computer keyboard), settling into this song’s dynamite-verse-and-chorus-induced piano flow state.

However, it’s the loop-worthy intro—a see-saw between the 1 and the 4 chords (a C Major and an F Major)—that captured my attention this week, as these opening measures float through a cascade of inversions within the perfect 4th frequency.

In addition to the hypnotic bubble gum motif, another reason I’m stuck on the “Picture This” intro: The final descending F chord, played with the A as the root (A/C/F) is tricky in context and has forced me back into practice mode. Practice mode means slowing down. And slowing down means lingering in the notes and shapes, which come with a slew of lovely left-right combinations, such as: G with E; E with C; F with F, followed by F with an octave-jump-F; A with C/F/A; C with A/C/F; C with G/C/E. Plus there are a couple of passing D notes along the way; while belonging to neither the C nor F triad, the D, the 2 in the C scale, draws you back to the C (the 1) with lulling electricity.

Blondie’s Parallel Lines LP (1978)

My current pop foray into 101 music theory also means I’m savoring the curious finale to the intro, which is anchored by an A♭ Major chord; this A♭ triad includes two notes, A♭ and E♭, that are nowhere to be found in the C scale. While the black-note-heavy chord certainly stands out in bright C Major, it sounds joyous here (and poignant) rather than jarring.

“Picture This” was written by Blondie electric guitarist Chris Stein, front-woman Debbie Harry, and Farfisa, new wave pop keyboardist Jimmy Destri. Their songwriting sleight is premised on a flat 6 chord, in this case (in the key of C) the A♭ Major.

This magic trick involves switching to what’s known as the parallel scale; parallel scales share the same root note, but roll out a different sequence of subsequet notes. The C minor scale (C, D, E♭, F, G, A♭, and B♭) as opposed to the C Major (C, D, E, F, G, A, B), for example.

According to The Roadie Blog (my bolds explain why flatting the 6, a minor chord a Major scale, is played as a Major chord; in short, the 6 chord is a Major in the minor scale, and we’re simply transporting that chord into the C Major.)

You can borrow several different kinds of chords from parallel scales, including the flat-three, the minor fourth, and the flat-six. The flat-six… is a major chord from a parallel scale. So if you’re playing in C major, it will be an A flat major. Using a flat-six chord will add a bit of flavor to your … playing.

Shifting to the C minor scale via the A♭ chord (it’s an inversion with C at the root) puts two black notes inside the all-white key of C Major.

Sublime wavelengths ensue, lingering and shimmering from these parallel lines.

2) My blahs this week led to some unprecedented profligate behavior.

To whit—and some of these were birthday presents for someone else— I went on an impulsive online shopping spree:

On Sunday, I bought tickets to a play that’s being staged in New York City, comedian Cole Escola’s off-Broadway First Lady farce about Mary Todd Lincoln, Oh, Mary! It’s playing at the Lucille Lortel Theater in Greenwich Village. I bought tickets for a March performance.

Then, on Monday, I bought this Sesame Street lamp, the Wally Table Lamp, from Urban Outfitters.

Also on Monday, I bought a subscription to a feminist and top-tier food industry magazine Cherry Bombe. Apparently, each issue is like a book.

Then on Tuesday, I bought tickets to an upcoming Seattle Arts & Lectures event—a Q&A with Victoria Chang, contemporary poetry royalty.

I’ve been a Chang fan since I read her 2020 book Obit. I’m on record goofing out about this great collection in the mini-Q&A that literary journal Vallum did with me in early 2021, when I said:

Favorite Book of Poetry Discovered this Year
Victoria Chang’s “Obit.“ Ruminating on loss, Chang presents a series of philosophical thought experiments in plainspoken metaphors.

Mostly, she uses the traditional newspaper obituary format (both in form and tone) to write breathtaking poems about the death of optimism, logic, home, and other things that suddenly vanish when a loved one dies. She accents the obituary poems with tankas (my new favorite form), tiny five-line poems that loom large.

And bonus—which I didn’t even realize until after buying the tickets—Chang is being interviewed on stage by Jane Wong. Wong wrote another one of my favorite contemporary poetry collections, Overpour (2016).

P.s. Thanks to this crazy spending orgy, I have to buy airplane tickets to NYC now. Some say you have to spend to earn. But it seems to me, you have to spend more when you spend.

3) And lastly, let’s go with “‘All Bogged Down In” as opposed to All Lost In.

Reporting a PubliCola column this week, where I made the counterintuitive argument (counterintuitive to NIMBYs and Progressives alike) that we should give evil developers a tax break to support affordable housing production, I ended up getting a migraine from the Seattle Office of Housing’s unruly summary of their Mandatory Housing Affordability program (MHA); here are all their reports to date.

Their attempt to track the number of affordable housing units the program has created year to year and to show how much money the program has generated for the city’s affordable housing fund is a hot mess of buried data and convoluted prose.

Just try squaring these two corresponding sections from the 2022 report and 2021 report:

Affordable housing contributions through MHA were made for 260 projects with issued building permits in 2022. This is a decrease from the 290 projects making housing contributions in 2021. Comparing the last two calendar years, MHA payments decreased by 1.5% ($75.9 million in 2021 and $74.7 million in 2022) and MHA units committed to be provided through the performance option decreased by over one-third (107 MHA units in 2021 and 66 MHA units in 2022).

alongside:

MHA Units Placed in Service

MHA Units are complete (i.e. “placed in service”) upon issuance of a certificate of occupancy for the building.

MHA Units Committed

The performance option requires commitment of MHA Units as a condition of issuance of the first building permit that includes the structural frame for the structure. Commitments are finalized with execution and recording of an Office of Housing-approved MHA performance agreement. In 2021, property owners entered into agreements with the City to include 95 MHA Units in 13 projects totalin 1,286 units. As noted above, this is a sharp increase from year 2020 when owners of five projects totaling 208 units committed to set-aside 20 as MHA units. MHA performance agreements are executed for an additional five projects with building permit issuance still pending. Assuming those projects move forward, another 589 units would include a set-aside of 39 MHA units. The following table lists the 20 projects with committed MHA Units and under construction as of December 31, 2021.

I sent a polite email to the Office of Housing asking for help, which mostly just ended with them acknowledging a “discrepancy” in one of their charts.

My PubliCola colleague ECB, who has taken a data journalism class, saved the day by force fitting all the scattered and incongruent data into our own intelligible categories, making a spreadsheet to conjure apples to apples information. The bottom line seems to be that taxing affordable housing creates less of it.

I was happy to see I’m not the only one who thinks knee-jerk anti-development politics is a pathology. The same day my piece came out, the New York Times published a story about two NYC borough politicians who are teaming up to start a pro-development league.

Here’s the lead:

A housing crisis threatens New York City? A pair of politicians believe they have an answer: a new “league” of officials like themselves who want to welcome development, including development of market-rate apartments.

The two officials, Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, and City Councilman Erik Bottcher of Manhattan, started the group to counter the long-held theory that opposing development is a political win. That idea, many housing experts agree, has helped create a shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes in and around the city, driving rents and home prices ever higher as residents compete for the limited supply.

On Monday, the duo sent an invitation to all 160 state and city politicians who represent some piece of New York City to come to an inaugural meeting next month. Mr. Reynoso said he wanted officials to come even if they are skeptical, but not if they only want to resist housing.

“We do not want you if you’re just a straight NIMBY,” Mr. Reynoso said, referring to the phrase “not in my back yard,” often used as a label for people who oppose development.

And here’s the mic drop:

“Historically, what lawmakers have said to constituents is, ‘If you elect me, I will help stop new housing from being built in our community,’” Mr. Bottcher said. “We need to turn that on its head.”