There’s a human body, buzzing with desire to twist and challenge itself.

Check out the mixed media exhibit made for the World Press Photo Awards on MediaStorm. It is sensation-tinglingly beauteous, to this gal who’s typically turned off by sport:

Beyond the Body by Tomasz Gudzowaty

Whoops, sorry! In our July 13 post, we misspelled the name of a wonderfully-imaginative author, Davy Carren, featured in the Undertow Summer 2012 issue. We apologize for the mistake.

To a whimsical imagination:

Sweet Gerber baby, the brand spankin’ new issue of Undertow Magazine is here to pull you under into a blissful state of contemplation. Not only will we be at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival today with fresh prints of the full-length Summer issue, but our PDF will be available on on our site for your reading pleasure.

We thank the many who have dedicated time to our cause. We’re immensely grateful for all that hard work eked out by everyone on the team

Ed Higgins, Fredrick Pollack, Beth Enson, Valentina Cano, James Valvis, Daniel Hedges, Aaron Schott, J. Bradley, J.S. Maclean, Sonnet Mondal, John Grey, Sergio Ortiz,

AND

soak in the art and photography of : Katherine Eaton, Penelope Eaton, and Hamish Todd,

AND

ponder over the short story by:  Davy Carren

WHILE

explicating life with: Caroline Tapp and our living patron saint, Jefrey Schultz.

Grab a towel and hop in. The water’s warm.

More about loss, and boats. Because we’re in that kind of mood.

Nightfishing

by Gjertrud Schnackenberg

The kitchen’s old-fashioned planter’s clock portrays

A smiling moon as it dips down below

Two hemispheres, stars numberless as days,

And peas, tomatoes, onions, as they grow

Under that happy sky; but though the sands

Of time put on this vegetable disguise,

The clock covers its face with long, thin hands.

Another smiling moon begins to rise.

We drift in the small rowboat and hour before

Morning begins, the lake weeds grown so long

They touch the surface, tangling in an oar.

You’ve brought coffee, cigars, and me along.

You sit still, like a monument in a hall,

Watching for trout. A bat slices the air

Near us, I shriek, you look at me, that’s all,

One long sobering look, a smile everywhere

But on your mouth. The mighty hills shriek back.

You turn back to the lake, chuckle, and clamp

Your teeth on your cigar. We watch the black

Water together. Our tennis shoes are damp.

Something moves on your thoughtful face, recedes.

Here, for the first time ever, I see how,

Just as a fish lurks in deep water weeds,

A thought of death will lurk deep down, will show

One eye, then quietly disappear in you.

It’s time to go. Above the hills I see

The faint moon slowly dipping out of view,

Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Serenity, 

Ocean of Stroms…You start to row, the boat

Skimming the lake where light begins to spread.

You stop the oars, mid air. We twirl and float.

I’m in the kitchen. You are three days dead.

A smiling moon rises on fertile ground,

White stars and vegetables. The sky is blue.

Clock hands sweep by it all, they twirls around,

Pushing me, oarless, from the shore of you.

Marilyn Minter is an artist comparable to what they say good wine is: she becomes more exquisite with age. (Someday I will find a rich man or woman with class to show me if that old adage is true…) In the meantime, gimme gimme gimme  a glass of Babycham…

Gold Tip, 2009. C-Print

Wangechi Gold #3, 2009 C-print

Splish Splash, 2006 C-print

Shinola, 2008 C-print

#1 Videostill from voyeuristic hallucinative video installation “Green Pink Caviar” 2009

#2

#3

Blur the lines between consumerism, pornography, and commercialism…

Since we’ve given atmospheric recommendations lately, I’d say a lonely night read of this poem could be fantastïche. Joshua Robbins, dear friend to Undertow Magazine’s living patron saint, Jeffrey Schultz:

Blue Spark

By Joshua Robbins

Back deck Adirondack: evening hums.

Fly-by-nights kamikaze iridescence

Into the zapper’s electric blue.

Due west and past the river,

Thunderclouds horizon summer’s

thirsty ridge line and I, moth

To fluorescence, stalk the moon.

Once, in a bar’s back booth,

I was flesh-jolted AC.

In the dance floor’s strobe,

I radiated Plato, the Whitmanesque,

flashed the poetry of drag

And chrome, glittered vinyl, tiger print.

Outside, the city’s turbines

Churned the river’s darkness white.

Now it’s summer rain

On oil-stained driveways, backed-up gutters,

the low river’s drift.

Lightning spikes. I inhale the night:

Lawn mist. Insect Char. Behind

The clouds, the electric moon.

Calling this guy an “Armenian physics teacher” doesn’t offer a full view of his talents and interests. Take a look at the skill of astronomy teacher, lyre player, and photographer Suren Manvelyan, who found a picture of strange worlds in the eyes of his fellow friends and family, and other living things…

As a friend of mine worried about her level of calmness (low level calm) I told her to imagine reality and smile, to know one has the power to control its appearance. The color your reality takes on may be as inspiring as you make it.

Enjoy the day.

Karla Batres, Age 18, Loteria, Painting, Warsaw, IN

Speaking of perspectives through story-telling, Seattle-based artist Christpher Boffoli offers up quotidian scenes in unexpected settings. Aiming to shed light on America’s culture of over-consumption while drawing attention to the typically mundane, the artist/writer/photographer uses hand painted railway model figurines and puts them in edible worlds to encourage a good n’ healthy pondering over his macro photography pieces.

As quoted at telegraph.co.uk, “I chose food as a backdrop because it is a constant,” said Christopher.  ”People see a striking image of food and are immediately drawn in because it is something familiar.”

Buffoli wants people to have fun and enjoy while considering their surrounding world in a new light, in his exhibition titled “Big Appetites” (note: the exhibition was in Seattle ’til February; his macro food art collection is called Disparity)

“There is in some part a god-like feeling to having command of an entire world, which you can rearrange at any capricious whim.” ~ Buffoli