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Living the Life, biker photography, biker poetry
photographs by Doug Barber, aka Q-Ball
poems by Eddie (Sorez) Pliska, aka Sorez the Scribe
designed by Eric Wheatley
Published and Printed in the United States of America.
The thrust of this
book is a collection of my biker photography accompanied by
compatible Sorez’s biker poems. Living the Life is a personal view of a biker’s existence. Allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions from the material presented. It is not my intention to stereotype the folks in my photographs. This is because all bikers are not alike, but share the same contempt for being categorized.
The photography in this book is editorial in nature. Everyone in this book was photographed with their knowledge, and permission. It spans over 30 years of traveling with hard core bikers.
Classic images of bikers from the 70’s and earlier are a
hit among today’s discriminating enthusiasts. And it’s
not just a case of looking back through rose colored
glasses to motorcycling’s past. Rather it is the natural consequence when popular culture celebrates cartoonish exaggerations, and shuns the genuine.
Doug Barber’s photos remind us of a time when the bikes,
and the people that rode them were the real deal. Thankfully, Doug was there living it; not just as an observer from the outside. This collection of images combined with the words of Sorez the Scribe provides a unique glimpse into our culture’s past. For those that lived, partied and rode during that time it’s a memory book of sorts. For the new generation it represents the path less chosen, inspiration, and a history book of our two-wheeled forefathers.
Living the life, it’s good for your soul.
Todd Ingram
Editorial Director
Iron Horse Magazine
The Marriage of Biker Poetry and Photographic Genius:
Q-Ball’s master lens and Sorez the Scribe’s roadsharpened
pen ignites the page with the lure of the steel pony, the rolling thunder, the chink, chink, chink of the gravel, and a brotherhood that rides forever towards the horizon. While there are many photo books that spread bikers and their motorcycles flat out across a coffee table, and certainly Biker Poetry is beginning to stand on its own in the poetry community, Living the Life is the ‘IMAX of Biker Nation.’ Sorez’s poetic cadence draws you into Q-Ball’s lens where you are not just looking at some pictures, you are on the bike, riding with the pack, or just taking a solo run into the wind. From Basket Case to Road to Redemption Q-Ball and Sorez bring the Code of Ethics into ‘True 3D Soul’ with photo-word-graphics.
Living the Life is more than a photo-documentary,
or a poetry book, and it is deeper than a historical
perspective, Living the Life is history in the making
- a history that can open the pipes and blast down
highways at the speed of light.
MarySusan Williams-Migneault
RoadHousePress
poems by Eddie (Sorez) Pliska, aka Sorez the Scribe
designed by Eric Wheatley
Published and Printed in the United States of America.
The thrust of this
book is a collection of my biker photography accompanied by
compatible Sorez’s biker poems. Living the Life is a personal view of a biker’s existence. Allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions from the material presented. It is not my intention to stereotype the folks in my photographs. This is because all bikers are not alike, but share the same contempt for being categorized.
The photography in this book is editorial in nature. Everyone in this book was photographed with their knowledge, and permission. It spans over 30 years of traveling with hard core bikers.
Classic images of bikers from the 70’s and earlier are a
hit among today’s discriminating enthusiasts. And it’s
not just a case of looking back through rose colored
glasses to motorcycling’s past. Rather it is the natural consequence when popular culture celebrates cartoonish exaggerations, and shuns the genuine.
Doug Barber’s photos remind us of a time when the bikes,
and the people that rode them were the real deal. Thankfully, Doug was there living it; not just as an observer from the outside. This collection of images combined with the words of Sorez the Scribe provides a unique glimpse into our culture’s past. For those that lived, partied and rode during that time it’s a memory book of sorts. For the new generation it represents the path less chosen, inspiration, and a history book of our two-wheeled forefathers.
Living the life, it’s good for your soul.
Todd Ingram
Editorial Director
Iron Horse Magazine
The Marriage of Biker Poetry and Photographic Genius:
Q-Ball’s master lens and Sorez the Scribe’s roadsharpened
pen ignites the page with the lure of the steel pony, the rolling thunder, the chink, chink, chink of the gravel, and a brotherhood that rides forever towards the horizon. While there are many photo books that spread bikers and their motorcycles flat out across a coffee table, and certainly Biker Poetry is beginning to stand on its own in the poetry community, Living the Life is the ‘IMAX of Biker Nation.’ Sorez’s poetic cadence draws you into Q-Ball’s lens where you are not just looking at some pictures, you are on the bike, riding with the pack, or just taking a solo run into the wind. From Basket Case to Road to Redemption Q-Ball and Sorez bring the Code of Ethics into ‘True 3D Soul’ with photo-word-graphics.
Living the Life is more than a photo-documentary,
or a poetry book, and it is deeper than a historical
perspective, Living the Life is history in the making
- a history that can open the pipes and blast down
highways at the speed of light.
MarySusan Williams-Migneault
RoadHousePress
180 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 26, 2009
“Living the Life – Explaining the Whole Thing”
Rusty Baker put together a museum exhibit that included Doug Barber's photographs called Motorcycles and Art: 1950 - Present for the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2004. The exhibition included fifteen motorcycles, five images from Barber, and about sixty other works of art. He had invited Doug Barber to be a part of it because he was immediately drawn to his work. It was real. It was part of the past, but there was more to it than that.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Motorcycling gets under your skin. Whether you are new to it or have been riding since you were a kid, riding takes you places that only you can go. Whether it be work, war, or women that inspire you, at the end of the road your story is yours. The first time someone describes you as a "biker" and you overhear it, you may be proud or pissed off but one thing is for sure, what has gotten under your skin is now visible to others. Living the Life is a clear window into the history of American motorcycling, a huge history of machines, technology, culture, social politics, and the individuals who have their own tales to tell. Whenever you take a complicated thing like motorcycling and make some part of it visible, like the iceberg and its tip, you run some risks, one of them being that you will have to explain the whole thing.
As with any artist, the success of Barber's work often relies upon a little good luck. Good luck could have the entire G volume of the Biker Encyclopedia, but we might all agree that bicycles, not luck, are the real reason it is possible for any of us ride motorcycles. A little over a hundred years ago, people in Germany put a motor on a bicycle. Hotel Orlando Sidewalk Comando (page 46) is not about motorcycling, and yet it is. It is how all of us start, imagining our two wheels and oily chain have a better motor than just our skinny legs. This is a lucky kid, shot well by a lucky photographer. If there is any luck at all left in the world, the little biker in this picture may now be getting some gray in his beard or ponytail and is out there riding, too.
Orlando (inside cover spread),, seems to portray the same group of bikers barely visible in Hotel Orlando. It may be the same hotel or another one on the way, but there's something remarkable about this shot. It's a sum of its parts. Never mind the picture is hip enough to be an album cover for The Band. There is rest. There is dirt. There is dirt you don't care about because rest is better, laughter is better, PBR or something somebody twisted up is better. 2Orlando, like most of the images in Living the Life, come from another time but are timeless. This group could just as easily be a group of Confederate Calvary taking a break in the streets of some Pennsylvania town in 1863. We are them and they are us.
If riding is the one pure thing about being a biker, the one place where nothing else matters, a neutral ground for the good, the bad, and the ugly to find some small scrap of peace, we need images like this to remind us of the pure joy of riding Welcome Back,(page 42). The rider's posture, his whipping vest, and the hazy, otherworldly background flashing by tell you this thing is speeding up all the time. This rider, this bike, this whole world are just fading into the rush of it. He is drinking in the wind that Sorez' poem so beautifully describes. This image reminds me of the dedication image, IMO Ricky, which honors a man who was clearly content and comfortable in his own skin on two wheels.
There is always the dream of a having a better bike, improving your ride, or getting your hands dirty, and Jan’s Kitchen/Basket Case (page 32) is the place for that. It's not for everyone, working on motorcycles, but everyone does something they must do to their bike now and then with some deadline looming. Sturgis. Daytona. Laconia. Blessing of the Bikes. The list is endless, but we must get there. You may have no garage. You may not have a mechanic. You may have a thin wallet but have some skills. If you miss a chance to ride with your people, it is hard for you to forget. This is a part of Living the Life.
Sorez the Scribe's words, as in the case of many other poems in Living the Life, strike a true tone on the tuning fork next to the picture Run Gathering (spread 142).. The deal is that all of us always ride solo whether we like it or not. Motorcycling, like your work life or your personal life or your spiritual life, is just you at the core. You can ride in a group or with a club. You can go to work or take care of your kids or go to church, and you are around other people all the time, but your time on the earth is yours, your only property. You try to take people or things with you, it just gets complicated. Riding is something you must do alone even in a pack of a thousand bikes, and it becomes part of you sometimes best kept as a small, knowing smile on your own face, a joke to yourself, a good way to go into the night.
Like that significant, understanding quiet in a conversation between friends or a long rest in a great stretch of music, it's not always the noise we make but the wind in between that matters. That is Living the Life.
Rusty Baker Curator
Motorcycles and Art: 1950 – Present
Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Rusty Baker put together a museum exhibit that included Doug Barber's photographs called Motorcycles and Art: 1950 - Present for the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2004. The exhibition included fifteen motorcycles, five images from Barber, and about sixty other works of art. He had invited Doug Barber to be a part of it because he was immediately drawn to his work. It was real. It was part of the past, but there was more to it than that.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Motorcycling gets under your skin. Whether you are new to it or have been riding since you were a kid, riding takes you places that only you can go. Whether it be work, war, or women that inspire you, at the end of the road your story is yours. The first time someone describes you as a "biker" and you overhear it, you may be proud or pissed off but one thing is for sure, what has gotten under your skin is now visible to others. Living the Life is a clear window into the history of American motorcycling, a huge history of machines, technology, culture, social politics, and the individuals who have their own tales to tell. Whenever you take a complicated thing like motorcycling and make some part of it visible, like the iceberg and its tip, you run some risks, one of them being that you will have to explain the whole thing.
As with any artist, the success of Barber's work often relies upon a little good luck. Good luck could have the entire G volume of the Biker Encyclopedia, but we might all agree that bicycles, not luck, are the real reason it is possible for any of us ride motorcycles. A little over a hundred years ago, people in Germany put a motor on a bicycle. Hotel Orlando Sidewalk Comando (page 46) is not about motorcycling, and yet it is. It is how all of us start, imagining our two wheels and oily chain have a better motor than just our skinny legs. This is a lucky kid, shot well by a lucky photographer. If there is any luck at all left in the world, the little biker in this picture may now be getting some gray in his beard or ponytail and is out there riding, too.
Orlando (inside cover spread),, seems to portray the same group of bikers barely visible in Hotel Orlando. It may be the same hotel or another one on the way, but there's something remarkable about this shot. It's a sum of its parts. Never mind the picture is hip enough to be an album cover for The Band. There is rest. There is dirt. There is dirt you don't care about because rest is better, laughter is better, PBR or something somebody twisted up is better. 2Orlando, like most of the images in Living the Life, come from another time but are timeless. This group could just as easily be a group of Confederate Calvary taking a break in the streets of some Pennsylvania town in 1863. We are them and they are us.
If riding is the one pure thing about being a biker, the one place where nothing else matters, a neutral ground for the good, the bad, and the ugly to find some small scrap of peace, we need images like this to remind us of the pure joy of riding Welcome Back,(page 42). The rider's posture, his whipping vest, and the hazy, otherworldly background flashing by tell you this thing is speeding up all the time. This rider, this bike, this whole world are just fading into the rush of it. He is drinking in the wind that Sorez' poem so beautifully describes. This image reminds me of the dedication image, IMO Ricky, which honors a man who was clearly content and comfortable in his own skin on two wheels.
There is always the dream of a having a better bike, improving your ride, or getting your hands dirty, and Jan’s Kitchen/Basket Case (page 32) is the place for that. It's not for everyone, working on motorcycles, but everyone does something they must do to their bike now and then with some deadline looming. Sturgis. Daytona. Laconia. Blessing of the Bikes. The list is endless, but we must get there. You may have no garage. You may not have a mechanic. You may have a thin wallet but have some skills. If you miss a chance to ride with your people, it is hard for you to forget. This is a part of Living the Life.
Sorez the Scribe's words, as in the case of many other poems in Living the Life, strike a true tone on the tuning fork next to the picture Run Gathering (spread 142).. The deal is that all of us always ride solo whether we like it or not. Motorcycling, like your work life or your personal life or your spiritual life, is just you at the core. You can ride in a group or with a club. You can go to work or take care of your kids or go to church, and you are around other people all the time, but your time on the earth is yours, your only property. You try to take people or things with you, it just gets complicated. Riding is something you must do alone even in a pack of a thousand bikes, and it becomes part of you sometimes best kept as a small, knowing smile on your own face, a joke to yourself, a good way to go into the night.
Like that significant, understanding quiet in a conversation between friends or a long rest in a great stretch of music, it's not always the noise we make but the wind in between that matters. That is Living the Life.
Rusty Baker Curator
Motorcycles and Art: 1950 – Present
Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
June 9, 2011
1%er and other True Bikeriders' life, spanning thirty years.
As the title states, this truly is a photographic experience of "Living the Life", set in the earlies eays (1960s - 1970s) when "leading the life" was all important. Very few photos showing Evos; mostly early Shovels, Pans, Knuckles, some Flaties, Iron Sportsters & a couple Indians.
Includes authentic 1%ers scribes in the vein of AOA 1%er Mouldy.
As the title states, this truly is a photographic experience of "Living the Life", set in the earlies eays (1960s - 1970s) when "leading the life" was all important. Very few photos showing Evos; mostly early Shovels, Pans, Knuckles, some Flaties, Iron Sportsters & a couple Indians.
Includes authentic 1%ers scribes in the vein of AOA 1%er Mouldy.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews