leica

October 18, 2021

Leica Man

It was a bright and crisp October morning. Frost was about. Perfect football weather. Halloween decorations abounded. The leaves were falling. The squirrels darted to and fro. A few homeless men wandered around with their possessions.

I saw a middle-aged man on the sidewalk ahead of me with a camera strapped around his neck. I recognized it as a high end model. The man was shooting photographs of apples in a tree. This delighted me. Someone was out in the world making art in the morning and I walked into his process.

The man saw me and disengaged with the camera. He looked happy. He asked me if I’d seen the gray owl in the tree a few dozen feet behind me. I had not. How had I missed that! Well, he hadn’t and gotten the shot.

I asked him if the camera was a Leica. It was. He was shooting film, real film. I couldn’t believe it!

We then dived into the joys of film, developing and darkrooms and how it was all nearly vanished from our creative culture. I made a comparison to illuminated manuscripts and how they eventually went away as an art form. He then told me an incredible story: he had a relative who was some kind of monk in some kind of monastery in Los Angeles and working on an illuminated manuscript! With no computers! Now what was actually being illuminated in a manuscript in Los Angeles monastery in 2021 was something astonishing to consider. It might not even be religious in nature!

It was a great conversation, utterly invigorating, and it took place in the unlikeliest of places and at the unlikeliest of times.

Joy in the city!

But how did I miss the owl?

Support Meditations Blog

The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.