Instead of your traditional puff piece on voters’ states of mind today, NYTimes.com has a puff multimedia widget. I like this trend. (I also like Helvetica.)
For the record, I am feeling both excited and distracted. Connecticut isn’t exactly the most thrilling place to be today, and I voted absentee weeks ago in my hometown. But for some reason it still feels like a holiday. I have a new piece called Some Connecticut Gospel, which I wrote over the last couple of months. It’s partly about Ives, and how his music and inimitable personality have become a legend for composers, and also about these strange feelings (hope? patriotism?) that have been welling up inside me recently (see my Oct. 10 post).
This is not something I’m particularly used to. Connecticut is unlike some other states, whose residents seem to have a strong sense of group identity and even pride. I never feel “Connecticutian”; I tend to think of myself as a misplaced Californian, even though I only spent the first five years of my life in the Bay Area. Why is that? Did Connecticut used to have more of a personality? Before the factories shut down, before every city became a depressed corpse, before Route 7 became a parade of strip-malls and the southwest corner a spec-house paradise, the state must have had some real charm. Some Connecticut Gospel is a song of praise to this imagined place— Ives’s Connecticut. It will be premièred in Miami (of all places) on January 30th by members of the New World Symphony, and likely reprised up here in New Haven in February.