topics covered will be mainly, social commentary, political theory, beginner level contemporary philosophy (or rather, untrained level, as i am pretty good at this stuff, but have not read many works to have a fair grasp of the general trend of things), baseball, animu, and miscellaneous everyday observations. most of the meaningful remarks made here will be twisting in nuance due to my rather skimpy grasp of contemporary terminology in the social sciences, but hopefully they will not be annoying.
anyway, my brother was sent to a piano class at the age of 5. the most talked about reason was and still is 'equipping him for the future.' while that is true in the way that the mother sees things, there are things left unsaid. the child is being equipped to step into a way of life that is more fashionable and respectable than it is desirable: neither parents have surrounded their daily activities with genuine organic enjoyment of the arts. i am not qualified to comment on the historical and social causes of such a trend, but to be sure, [parents putting kid into piano lessons] is a social phenomenon.
anyway, now that the little kid has been at it for a year, he's displayed some aptitude during the times when he made some effort at playing and attending classes. but the piano never became more than a compelled hobby for him. the child is not obsessed with any particular piano appreciation culture, has more appreciation for yugioh (otherwise known as "you gay ho" in respectable circles) than classical music..etc
and for various other reasons that i, for lack of energy and interest, will not elaborate, the piano affair has now turned into little more than slave assignment work. everyday, the kid is expected to play for 30 minutes, and when he instead spends all the time on watching "finding nemo" for the goddamn 2523534th time(I fucking hate that fucking goddam fish. go get eaten by a fucking whale, fucking idiot ), the mother, whom i have recently understood to exist most of the time as a storm of expressive attitudes and emotions,(rather entrenched commitments to whatever fashion that is respectable. social animal etc) blows up. the kid will resist the oppression by tear and eventually relent to spend some time on the piano. i will not talk about the shoulds and stuff on this matter, but what is apparent is that, with this type of piano-life, it is just learning a technical skill at best. they say in the old days, master of arts are geniuses, but, how only a genius could do organic art within this sort of arts education is a legitimate point. with the child in question, there is little hope of him ever appreciating the piano as art, more as a skill that later on he may hold in contempt of his lesser trained peers. but by then, he would have developed a talent for this stuff, or so he would claim.
so over dinner i, having already given up hope of ever enlightening the parents in any revolutionary way(and plunging them into postmodern dispair, god no) commented that education is the organic formation of the human life. a household lacking in organic appreciation of music and the arts is not an environment from which the child could be immersed in high culture. but of course then i went on to comment how the kid should grow up like me and was shouted down, rather deservingly.
The first post was made without an overview of my still unstable view of, for the lack of a non-biased term, positive human behavior and social/active human process (the two dialectical positions is similar to the wave-particle thing, with human as a concrete, material animal with meaningful natures, and on the other hand, the distinct perspective of human lives, particularly humans in society, as an active process or current. the analogy that comes to mind is, humans are dominoes, and human action is the falling of dominoes. but still, this is largely a preliminary view, and i think the domino itself is spoken of within the language of the social human, and the positive existence of 'humans' rather resemble a bondle of binded straw than a solid piece of lumber. but this understanding does not prevent or restrain wandering between the aforementioned poles, rather it shows that the human mode of thinking, conditioned and passed down, is more pervasive than one would be inclined to believe, and with further reflection that will not be covered here, that human thought and activity could be viewed almost completely as 'movement' is the true strength of the divide. (i suppose, being a post modernist would make this easier to appreciate, but those guys are kinda being hypocrites or something, largely because of the lack of rigor in their training that has produced some of hte most shallow bullshit clothed as high philosophy. not to say therea re no good post modernists, but most are floundering in a tidal sea that has left them dazed)
anyway, i'll do a review of the animu i watched over the summer sometime in the future. then i'll review the importance of establishing positive human behavior (as in positivist positive) in order to escape the post modernist prison.