An odd recommendation, but again, one that works for me, is Brian Eno’s Discreet Music – one of the grandaddys of modern electronic music.

In another vein entirely, there’s the improvisational guitar work of Steve Kimock, who plays everything from wonderful soul-soothing lyrical ballads(”Green”, “Cole’s Law”), to anthemic mythic journeys (”Avalon”), to time- and mind-bending, jazzy psychedelic funk (”Elmer’s Revenge”). There are hundreds of his shows up on Archive.org’s Live Music Archive. Try a couple; like other improvisational artists, he never seems to play the same song exactly the same way twice.

Miles Davis – “In a Silent Way”

After the Senate passed the torture bill, I came home and played the Mozart that always accompanies my deepest sorrow:
the second movement of the Clarinet Quintet in A, K. 581, the Larghetto.

I was utterly despondent about my country. Now, when I look at the liner notes, which say that the piece was composed in 1789, I realize that this piece by Mozart is contemporaneous with the adoption of the Constitution. Studying history, I truly believed in the pragmatic optimism of the Enlightenment. Now I am convinced we are on the way to some form of fascism. There was an interesting quote in Sunday’s NY Times Book Review, in a review written by Tom Reiss, the author of The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, of the new book by Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known:
“In November 2005, Fritz Stern received an award for his life’s work on Germans, Jews, and the roots of National Socialism, presented to him by Joschka Fischer, then German foreign minister. With a frankness that startled some in the audience, Stern, an emeritus professor of European history at Columbia University, peppered his acceptance speech with the similarities he saw between the path taken by Germany in the years leading up to Hitler and the path being taken by the United States today. He talked about a group of 1920s intellectuals known as the ‘conservative revolutionaries,’ who ‘denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality, and cosmopolitan culture,’ and how Hitler has used religion to appeal to the German public. In Hitler’s first radio address after becoming chancellor, Stern noted, he declared that the Nazis regarded ‘Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.’
“Stern was of course not suggesting an equivalence between President Bush and Hitler but rather making a more subtle critique, extending his idea that contemporary American politics exhibited ’something like the strident militancy and political ineptitude of the Kaiser’s pre-1914 imperial Germany.’”

I’m adding this book to my list of things to read, along with Stern’s first book The Politics of Cultural Despair, which was published in 1961. As Reiss put in the closing paragraphs of the review, “…Stern looks for the nihilistic undercurrents in our own educated, commercial societies. Hunger and poverty have little to do with the politics of cultural despair. It thrives especially well at moments of plenty and prosperity, when people have enought social advantages to dwell on their inner alienations and resentments.
“By probing history for answers to how Germany progressed from radical illiberalism to Nazism, Stern has created a cumulative canon of warning signs for the degeneration of any great nation’s politics.”

Yes my parents had their wonderful moments. My father was a preacher–so there were moments that were VERY difficult as well. One good thing about a religious upbringing is that you get to know all the great music for formal occasions. There is some great funeral music–the Mozart and Verdi Requiems come to mind but it is hard to top Brahms!!

Your comment was sad. I’m sorry. But your sorrow just reflects how much you loved them and what wonderful parents they must have been.

I put on a superb recording of Brahm’s “Ein Deutches Requiem” and wept for a least an hour. It was astonishing how theapuetic that was.