Truman Waters, indie band

Portland's like one of those watches where you can see everything working, or not.

The transparency is appealing.

As opposed to San Francisco, where the surface to sky beauty is out of this world but tends to mask dysfunction.

I like it that I can hear the train going thru downtown Portland at 2a.m. That I can look out at the city by 8 and see steam rising from the pipes and industrial chimneys of a workplace that's making things like beer and sprockets for derailleurs on bicycles. It's far easier to presume that the people I see going to work, crossing one of the ten bridges, have their egos in check and are working for the right reason--because they mostly like what they're doing.

When I'm in Portland I wonder what happened to San Francisco, and when I'm in San Francisco I wonder what happened to San Francisco.

I met Kirk Branstetter on the golf course a couple of weeks ago: Eastmoreland, southeast Portland. Kirk and his brother had a band, Truman Waters, that I guess did pretty well in the 1990's. I don't know, I wasn't listening much then, or I was listening to other things. Anyway, they toured with Beck and Sonic Youth. Kirk still plays, but makes his living working in a homeless shelter downtown.

When I first met him, I asked if he minded if I smoked. He laughed, as he had a cigarette between his lips. We've played together a couple of times since.

If you look closely at the picture of Kirk and his golf bag, you can see a cigarette butt sticking up out of his hand-crafted ashtray--an ashtray he took out of a 1972 Datsun and recycled, if not repurposed.