I have been trying to use my Treo as an mp3 player now that my iPod’s battery has started to die. I found an open-source program called iTunes Agent lets me synch directly with iTunes so I don’t have to manually move files around every time. It should work with almost any mp3 player. Here’s how I set it up:

1. Buy a big SD memory card for your Treo. (I got a 1GB at Sears for around $60).
2. Put the memory card in your phone to format it with the default Palm stuff.
3. Download and install the Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0. (20MB)
4. Download and install iTunes Agent.
5. Right click on the iTunes Agent system tray icon and go to “Preferences”.
6. Click “New” and Fill in Name: “Treo”, Synch. pattern: “Flat”, Music folder: [leave blank], Rec. pattern: “D:PALM”
7. Save it, and pop the SD Card into your computer.
8. Open iTunes and put songs in the playlist called “Treo”.
9. Right click on the iTunes Agent system tray icon and select “Synchronize Device”.

Today Mark and I went to a gallery talk at the Dreaming California photography exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum.  Bill Owens, Larry Sultan, and Pirkle Jones, the husband of the late Ruth-Marion Baruch all spoke about the work on display.  I like the work of all three photographers, and I enjoy thinking about the complex issues revolving around the pictures.  Despite the rainy weather, there was an excellent turn-out for the talk.  I was so happy to see so many people enthusiastic about their work, and it was great to see the pictures on the wall, larger, and some in color (a far cry from when I discovered Owens’ Suburbia at the art library in Bloomington).  I was also very happy that Bill Owens seems to have a great personality, and not the ego of a “typical” artist!

Ruth-Marion Baruch documented hippies from Haight Ashbury and women shopping in San Francisco in the 1960s.  The shopping pictures, which I find very interesting, are from the Illusion for Sale series.  The expressions of the women are remarkable – they are unsure, they are hoping for something, and they look sharp and ridiculous at the same time.  They are often contemplating the illusion, and determining whether they will buy it.  Other times, they have bought it, and it is obviously an illusion.  One picture showed two older ladies from behind with fox fur collars walking a poodle.  They looked ridiculously extravagant and foul.  Yet a younger version of those women, from a different angle, would look like an ad you might see to sell fashion today.  Pirkle Jones pointed out that these pictures could only be taken by a woman, and I agree that women have a particular sensitivity to these issues.

Bill Owens took pictures of his neighbors living in the suburban communities of Livermore and Walnut Creek in the 1970s.  The photographs present the people and places – new houses, new lawns, people living the American dream.  Is he making fun of his neighbors?  Of course he is, but to leave it at that is too simplistic.  The people are often happy, or aspiring to a dream.  He presents this happiness.  At the same time, we know a nice lawn, a bedroom with a mirrored ceiling, or extravagant manicured nails will not give you a very fulfilling contentment.  Maybe the people are truly happy, or maybe they’re not.  We don’t know, but what I take from these images, and as Larry Sultan brought up, is ambivalence.  There are good times, as a woman smiles standing watering the lawn with her baby in her arms, but we know there are bad times, too, as they stand isolated in an other-worldly suburbia.  His photographs do a great job of presenting the weirdness of ordinary suburbs of the 1970s.

Larry Sultan’s work includes some images from suburbs, akin to Owens’ work, and he had an interesting series of pictures about the pornography industry in suburbia.  Apparently, in suburban LA, regular houses are rented out to shoot pornographic videos.  These large color photos were well-done and somewhat disturbing.  They reminded me a little of Cindy Sherman.  I preferred the suburban photos.  One showed a man inside his house practicing his golf swing on green carpet.  Sultan described what took place leading up to a picture he took of his parents in their Palm Springs home.  He was fumbling with his camera, and his father grew impatient, so he sat down to watch TV.  His mother felt bad about how his father was being insensitive, and “posed” for Sultan by putting on an apologetic face.  The resulting photograph is very interesting, and very uneasy.  You see the father from behind, sitting watching a baseball game, and you see the uneasy mother, dressed up, against the wall, facing the camera, trying to smile.

What I enjoyed most about going to this gallery talk is that other people see some of the strangeness that exists in modern suburbs and cities.  There are questions about identity that are complicated by fashion and advertising.  Culturally, we have dreams to buy big houses and have big yards.  Isn’t that strange?  Why should ownership bring so much happiness, and does it really?  Culturally, we have to work a lot so we can buy a lot.  But does having a lot bring contentment?  Sultan noted that as a culture we look to the pornography industry for passion and intimacy, rather than in our own lives.  The dream presented in this exhibition is mostly an empty illusion.  And the illusion truly is for sale in many ways.  We face pressures to buy and pressures to live “the dream.”  This creates problems for the way communities develop, by encouraging suburban sprawl, and it creates all kinds of psychological problems.  A promising alternative, promoting conscious living and thoughtful buying, is described on the New American Dream site.

This book is a collection of character sketches called “grotesques.”  I wanted to read this book because it had a creative organization, with the character sketches loosely related; because it was about Ohio, where I’m from; and because it was about a time period that interests me, post civil war to early 1900s.  I think I would have really liked to have read this book in high school, but now I can only give it mediocre marks.

Each character sketch is 2-10 pages long, and each sketch is mostly depressing.  Of course, that is part of the theme of the book.  Each person seems to have some desire to do something, and struggles to do it.  Most of the desires relate to being loved and accepted.  There are a lot of examples of people being inhumane and mean spirited, which I found difficult to read.  It read like a demented soap opera.  Psychology is a primary focus, and plots are thin.

That being said, there were some interesting passages.  For example, the creepy doctor who later has an affair with the main character’s mother is one of the few who knows “the sweetness of the twisted apples.”  These are apples that are not picked, but left on the tree and free for the taking.  They are undesirable because they are twisted, but they are delicious because the sweetness gathers in the grotesque folds.

One of my favorite sections was “Loneliness.”  It tells the story of an artist, Enoch Robinson.  He left Winesburg and went to New York and hung out with other artists.  He wanted to speak volumes but could never get the words to come out of his mouth right.  “He did not want friends for the quite simple reason that no child wants friends.”  He preferred to speak to the people in his mind, whom he could control and with whom he could be confident.  He got married and got a job as a commercial artist to play the role of “citizen,” but he could not deal with that life and went back to New York to talk to his imaginary friends, and then ended up back in Winesburg.  I enjoyed reading about this crazy artistic personality.

At the end of the book, after generations of disappointment, the main character leaves Winesburg.  He is a hero who has finally found the courage to go after what he wants.  Winesburg ends up representing repression and resulting inappropriate expression under the guise of normalcy.