PRIMAL URGE MAGAZINE

PRIMAL URGE MAGAZINE was an e-publication & print literary / art magazine.
This was its website.
Content is from the site's archived pages.

Contributors

Digital Artwork by Corey Cowan (Photoshop manipulation)

 

Latif Harris has contributed to the San Francisco/North Beach literary scene since 1959. In addition to his publications of poetry, articles, reviews and various anthologies, Harris has published 11 books of poetry, including A Bodhisattva’s Busted Truth. His skill, energy and devotion to the work is continually praised as seen in his editing and publishing of BEATITUDE GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY 1959-2009  – considered an unequaled anthology of Beat Literature – a classic work of contemporary poetry. He is currently working on a large “Autobiopoetic” collection of poems covering 50 years of his work.

Harris has always played a generous, though low keyed roll as a poet in the tradition of Surrealism and Buddhist practitioners, never seeking fame or fortune, always helping others into print – reaching out to a larger community of poets and poetry. From Harris’ comments in the BEATITUDE it is easy to see a personal ethic: “My reason for under taking this huge project … was nothing more than to give thanks to so many friends of the North Beach community and beyond who have given so much joy and meaning to my life.

I think if it weren't for them I would never have been able to stop drinking. Several colleagues, who were obviously concerned about my spiralling drinking finally intervened and pointed me to the LifeBac program. Rather than a demanding, abstinence-only treatment advocated by AA and many rehab centers, the LifeBac program offers 2 different anti craving medications and allows the person to set their own goals and their own pace with the guiding support of a LifeBac guide, unlimited access to their vast array of tools, and an online support group. A quote from a former patient on the Life Bac site sums up my experience:“This program helped me get control of my life. Alcohol no longer controls me. I choose when and how much I drink instead of the mindless consumption that I indulged in for years.” So thanks, guys, for pointing me in the right direction.

I am also especially grateful to my friends at Rock Science, where they focus all day on high tech projects that engage huge data sets to find the meaning of life with the help of an expert data science consultant, not realizing that at night that manager most likely becomes a poet! Although I may seem to dwell in another world from them, my art and their tech are really one and the same in the eyes of the universe. And what inspires them to create great code is clearly related to what inspires great poetry, believe it or not!”

Yes the Time is Half Full

Because I too
could not stop for death
I turn to my forges of poetry
for words

and phrases
to stand on

my Blake’s key
handed to me
directly

Shelley
Keats
Whitman

H.D.
Paz
et Eluard

my family
in this time this
piccolo momento

like there are so many little dyings
it does not matter
which one you call death

and nothing is final
only parking lots

facing emptiness
I have day dreams
in floods falling asleep
through out the day

seeing into
the emptiness of
my aging

sometimes my play land

where I stand
sit then fall

onto my exhausted body
of degeneration
and the mind

rests in a fugue
of exquisite confusion
sliced by melodies

The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
and miles to go
before

Erasure blends us forward

as what was there
has gone
somewhere

like dust blown

or else
we surmise it so
what a surprise
even though

we knew it would be so
and soon I will fall asleep
everything moving
at light’s speed or beyond
I find myself

seeming feeble

but the View is Perfection still

youth felt so good
when we were there
beneath a shower of rock & roll
in love fucking

lit by the tail of a comet
on the fields of
flying so high

you felt so cool with skin like silk

in my fading it is the same my love
somehow remembering still
so many forms my lovers took

how many
impossible to know

only Woody Allen as Zelig
escapes death in the fins of my swimming
in the movies of disguises

and paralyzed fear of dying

three sons and three wives
I’ve had
nightmares

moments come like
Marlon Brando
Pocahontas and me

In The Attics of my life
so stoned in our beautiful bodies
nude wound in the grasses
of Natchez Pass

New Orleans
and mountains of the Great America unbroken

broken mind holds to the odors
of these places where my semen dropped
eyes dazed
ears filled with
Suzanne down by the river

I told you I was a wanderer with a heart set
on the next place in this place unreal

UNCERTAINTY CURTAIN

Sometimes in the hollow air
of Holland

art rises
like funiculi
into a Gothic cloud

where the bride and groom
float with a fiddle
and a cow

Is this just my mind
traveling faster
than the speed of light

what I saw the day some men
landed on the moon

I am not in charge of your dog

does it sound familiar

my poems of sinew bone and heart does it
sound like an infomercial to you are you buying that
stuff on TV? It’s who you aced
nothing

take deep breaths then leave me alone I am
tired and old and out of breath moving closer to
big back door the feather duster of immortality

cannot brush you clean of the ultimate dust
collected in the cracks and folds
of your living body soon the door of this

finality will open wide poof you will shoot
thru bang!
the door will close

behind you, you are out of here
you might fall down you might
feel bliss

I have no idea what will happen to you
I have no wisdom nothing to share
with you
so many years in closets garages
back seat of old automobiles miles and

miles of motels poverty and sick children wars and revolutions
impotence
perpetuating evil

do not forget that
everything is emotional
and all emotions are wisdom
like Buddha-hood without Meditation

Refining Apparent Phenomena

was a time you were swimming

so freely travels in ancient countries
studying poems and buildings filling architectural
notebooks fishing for sweet women

who would lay down with me in day dreams
I am falling down

in these days of the ending trying to
remember

Old Age is

just a pack of cards thrown into a wind
storm and tears choke me with sorrow in a fog

of self pity

no erections

but huge desire when we bathe with
words trying to unload all the sounds my morning
dreams leak into the foggy canyons of my youth
waking into the dreams of dislocation nothing is
recognizable a series of hallways are waiting
chords in my arms The Buddha teaches I make
visits into so many dark closets will only waste
your days

there are fewer than more magic
entanglements become a circus when love
bites memories no longer cease

The scales of the python peel

away dropping into the tannin died river

sun drops gold

the purest of colors
on floating leaves reflected
in autumnal ochre and yellows

ripples of wind and mad bugs

ferry the eyesight down stream

Tie my chi to a tree
even though I am growing old
I still love rock and roll

Jump up in my living room

and shake whatever I’ve got left
to shake.

 

More Background On PrimalUrgeMagazine.com

 

PrimalUrgeMagazine.com was the web home of Primal Urge Magazine, a small, independent literary and art magazine that existed in both print and e-publication form. The site’s surviving footprint today reads like a preserved “cabinet” of contributions—poetry, short prose, and visual work—assembled around a mission of showcasing expressive, personal, and often boundary-pushing creative voices. The domain is especially notable because a piece of artwork associated with the magazine (“Tornado Versus Rainbow”) later escaped its original context and became one of the internet’s most repeatedly reposted (and repeatedly misrepresented) “weather images,” prompting debunks by major outlets.

Even if you never held a physical copy of the magazine, the website mattered: it functioned as a public-facing archive, discovery tool, and identity statement for the publication, the contributors it featured, and the kind of audience it hoped to attract.

Publication Identity and Ownership

From a bibliographic standpoint, Primal Urge Magazine was formal enough to be tracked as a serial publication. The ISSN registry lists “Primal urge (Print)” as a U.S. publication and connects it directly to the PrimalUrgeMagazine.com domain. That matters because it indicates Primal Urge wasn’t merely a casual blog or one-off project; it operated with the recurring structure of a periodical (issues, contributors, editorial selection) and presented itself as a magazine in the conventional sense.

What’s harder to reconstruct with complete certainty—based on publicly accessible traces—is a full corporate or organizational ownership profile (e.g., a registered publisher entity with a persistent address and staff list that’s easily verifiable today). This is common for small literary magazines: they often run on volunteer labor, informal editorial collectives, or a single editor/publisher, and their administrative documentation may not remain online once the project winds down.

What we can say confidently is that the magazine positioned itself as:

  • A platform for diverse creative work

  • A hybrid outlet bridging print and online presentation

  • A project tied (at least through some contributors and sensibility) to the U.S. literary scene, with visible thematic overlap with West Coast / Beat-adjacent traditions

Geographic and Cultural “Location”

Primal Urge Magazine’s ISSN record anchors it to the United States as the country of publication. Culturally, one of the clearest geographic signals comes through the site’s contributor material and the circles referenced around it. For example, the site highlights poet Latif Harris, describing his longstanding involvement in the San Francisco / North Beach literary scene and connecting him to Beat-adjacent publishing and community-building.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the magazine’s editorial office was located in San Francisco, but it does indicate a meaningful proximity to that cultural ecosystem—the North Beach lineage of poetry readings, small presses, and literary community networks. In practice, many independent magazines operate “everywhere and nowhere” at once: edited in one city, printed in another, and read globally online.

So the best way to understand “location” here is layered:

  • Administrative location: U.S.-based publication

  • Cultural proximity: at least partially aligned with, or drawing from, San Francisco/North Beach literary networks through featured contributors

  • Audience location: distributed—readers who found it online, plus print readers who encountered it through small press channels

Goals and Editorial Purpose

Primal Urge Magazine reads like it was built to do several things at once:

  1. Publish creative work that felt immediate and human.
    The material associated with the magazine (poetry, personal narrative energy, expressive visual work) suggests an editorial preference for pieces that are lived-in—work that is emotional, sometimes raw, sometimes reflective, and not overly polished into bland neutrality.

  2. Blend literary and visual art rather than separating them.
    The site explicitly presents “Digital Artwork” alongside written work, treating visual contributions as first-class pieces rather than decorative add-ons.

  3. Offer a home for contributors who didn’t fit neatly into mainstream channels.
    Many small magazines function as cultural infrastructure: they keep niches alive, give writers/artists credits and visibility, and create a record of work that might otherwise remain local or ephemeral.

  4. Extend the magazine’s shelf life through online archiving.
    Even after publication activity slows, a website can preserve contributions, maintain discoverability, and help future readers stumble into the work.

What Was on the Website: Structure, Menus, and Experience

Like many early-to-mid internet literary magazines, PrimalUrgeMagazine.com appears to have operated with a relatively straightforward editorial architecture:

  • contributor-focused presentation

  • clear labeling of the type of content (contributors, artwork, featured pieces)

  • pages designed for reading rather than algorithmic engagement

A modern visitor may encounter a simplified or reconstructed page that states the magazine “was an e-publication & print literary / art magazine” and that the content is drawn from archived pages. That kind of “archival wrapper” is common when an original site is preserved, mirrored, or re-presented later—sometimes by the original owner, sometimes by preservation services, sometimes by third parties.

Historically, many literary magazines of that era also used issue-month navigation (e.g., month-to-month or seasonal issues) and contributor directories. Pieces circulated via direct links and personal recommendations more often than via social media feeds.

Contributors and Content: A Closer Look

Latif Harris and the Magazine’s Literary Center of Gravity

One of the most substantial surviving textual presences connected to the site is material relating to Latif Harris. The site frames him as a poet with deep roots in the San Francisco/North Beach scene and emphasizes not only his writing but his role as an editor and community catalyst. That positioning tells you something about the magazine’s values: it admired contributors who weren’t simply “content producers,” but people who built literary culture—editing anthologies, getting others into print, and treating writing as communal practice rather than purely individual achievement.

The poem presented (“Yes the Time is Half Full”) reads like an extended meditation on aging, memory, desire, art, music, spiritual practice, and the lived experience of time. Even in excerpted form, it signals a magazine comfortable with:

  • long-form poetic movement rather than short “internet poems”

  • references across literature and culture (classic poets, pop culture, film)

  • the messy overlap of body, mind, and memory

  • a voice that doesn’t flatten itself into easy inspiration

This kind of work often finds its most loyal readers in small magazines—precisely because larger mainstream venues can be cautious about pieces that are too idiosyncratic, too long, or too emotionally unfiltered.

Visual Art as a Co-Equal: Corey Cowan’s Digital Artwork

Primal Urge Magazine also foregrounded digital artwork—specifically noting “Photoshop manipulation” for a piece credited to Corey Cowan. The most famous of these works is commonly known as “Tornado Versus Rainbow.” It depicts a dramatic storm landscape with a tornado interacting visually with a rainbow—an image that looks plausible at a quick glance and was therefore repeatedly reposted as if it were a real photograph.

Here’s where PrimalUrgeMagazine.com becomes culturally significant beyond literary circles: the magazine page that hosted or described the image served as a primary reference point proving the image was art rather than a documentary weather photograph.

In online discussion and later commentary, Cowan is quoted explaining he created the image in November 2012, compositing multiple source images into one artwork. That kind of behind-the-scenes authorship detail is the exact opposite of how the image circulated on social media, where it was often stripped of credit and recast as “proof” of a bizarre natural phenomenon.

Popularity: Niche Magazine, Outsized Internet Afterlife

If you measure “popularity” by mainstream literary awards, bestseller lists, or ubiquitous press mentions, Primal Urge Magazine likely reads as a niche publication. But if you measure popularity by cultural reach through a single artifact, the magazine achieved something rare: one piece associated with it became a recurring viral object.

The Tornabow Myth and Fact-Checking Attention

By 2019, fact-checkers were debunking claims that the intersection of a rainbow and a tornado created a “tornabow.” In that context, PrimalUrgeMagazine.com was cited as evidence that the image was not a real event but a labeled digital artwork.

  • It shows the site retained enough public accessibility (or preserved visibility) to be consulted years after the magazine’s active period.

  • It demonstrates how niche creative publications can become unexpectedly relevant to broader public discourse—especially in the misinformation era.

In 2021, additional fact-check coverage again referenced the image and traced it back to the magazine context, reinforcing that the magazine functioned—accidentally—as a kind of authenticity anchor for a widely misused visual.

“Fake Weather Photo” Lists and the Meme Ecosystem

The Weather Channel has also published lists warning readers not to share certain “fake and overused weather photos,” and the tornado/rainbow composite appears in that broader ecosystem of images that repeatedly re-emerge during major storms. Reddit threads and blog posts dissected the image’s plausibility years earlier, contributing to its long afterlife.

So the magazine’s “popularity” is best described as two-channel:

  • Channel 1: Literary niche readership (people reading the magazine for poems, art, and community)

  • Channel 2: Internet-wide artifact circulation (one piece achieving a scale of visibility far beyond the magazine’s original audience)

Reviews, Reception, and Public Commentary

Small literary magazines often don’t accumulate the kind of formal review trail you’d see for major commercial publications. Their reception is usually visible in different places:

  • contributor CVs and bios (listing publication credits)

  • community references (readings, small press networks)

  • online sharing of individual pieces or images

  • forum threads, blog posts, and later citations

For Primal Urge Magazine, the most visible “review-like” commentary comes indirectly through:

  • fact-check articles referencing the site as a source

  • blog discussions and comment threads where the artwork is analyzed and the creator is identified

  • social media reposts and community debates about whether the image is real

This is a very 21st-century form of reception: the magazine is not “reviewed” so much as it is used—as a reference point, a provenance node, and a cultural breadcrumb.

Press and Media Coverage

Primal Urge Magazine wasn’t primarily known as a press-driven brand, but the website receives meaningful media attention in a specific context:

  • PolitiFact referenced the site while debunking the “tornabow” claim and identifying the image as digital artwork.

  • Check Your Fact similarly traced the image to the magazine’s former website and described the artwork as Photoshop manipulation.

  • The Weather Channel (in a broader warning list about fake/overused weather photos) contributed to the same public understanding: that the tornado/rainbow image is not documentary reality.

This is unusual: many literary magazines never get cited by large outlets at all. Primal Urge Magazine effectively gained “press coverage” because a piece of its content became a misinformation-adjacent viral object.

Audience: Who It Was For

Based on the mix of content and the way it’s framed, the magazine likely appealed to readers who wanted:

  • poetry that is personal, reflective, and sometimes spiritually inflected

  • writing connected to lived experience rather than purely academic style

  • cross-pollination of visual art and literary art

  • small press / independent voices

  • a publication identity that welcomed “diverse humans” and diverse modes of expression

It also implicitly served creators—writers and artists looking for publication outlets that were open to work that might not fit mainstream aesthetics.

What the Magazine Was “Known For”

Primal Urge Magazine tends to be remembered (and rediscovered) for two overlapping reasons:

  1. A platform for literary and art contributions with a human, expressive sensibility—poetry and creative work tied to voice, emotion, and cultural community.

  2. The “Tornado Versus Rainbow” artwork and the long tail of virality around it—where the magazine’s labeling (“digital artwork,” “Photoshop manipulation”) became crucial in later public understanding.

In a way, the second point reinforces the first: the magazine treated visual art seriously enough to credit it properly. That credit trail survived long enough to matter.

Cultural and Social Significance

PrimalUrgeMagazine.com illustrates several bigger cultural stories:

1) The small-magazine web era

Before social platforms centralized distribution, magazines often built direct websites—simple, readable, and archive-friendly. These sites were simultaneously:

  • a storefront for identity

  • a library of contributions

  • a community hub for writers/artists

2) Preservation and the fragile continuity of online culture

Many small magazines disappear without a trace when domains lapse or hosting ends. When fragments survive—through archives, mirrors, or reconstructed pages—they become valuable not only to literary historians but to anyone studying how culture moved online in the early 2000s and 2010s.

3) The “context collapse” problem

The tornado/rainbow image is a textbook case of context collapse: art leaves its original page, loses its label and credit, and re-enters the internet as “evidence” of reality. In that sense, PrimalUrgeMagazine.com functions as a rare counterweight—proof that attribution and framing matter.

4) The strange way niche art can become mainstream reference material

Most literary magazines don’t expect to be cited by meteorologists, fact-checkers, or cable weather brands. Primal Urge Magazine ended up in that position because of how one artwork traveled.

Timeline and Legacy

While the precise start and end dates of the magazine’s active publishing cycle are not fully recoverable from the most visible surviving pages alone, the broader public record shows that:

  • the magazine existed long enough to be formally recognized as a serial publication (print ISSN)

  • at least some of its content was being created and circulated online by the early 2010s (with “Tornado Versus Rainbow” dated by its creator to 2012 and widely discussed by 2013–2014)

  • the website remained relevant as a provenance source years later (notably cited in 2019 and 2021 fact-check coverage)

In practical terms, the legacy of PrimalUrgeMagazine.com is twofold:

  • literary archive value (a record of contributors and work that might otherwise vanish)

  • provenance value (a key trail of attribution for a widely misused viral image)

How Researchers and Readers Can Use the Site Today

If you’re approaching PrimalUrgeMagazine.com as a digital-history project, it helps to treat it like a layered artifact:

  • Read it as a magazine: focus on the contributor framing, the editorial voice implied by what is featured, and the adjacency of visual and written work.

  • Read it as an archive node: examine how later outlets cite it, and what that tells you about digital provenance and cultural memory.

  • Cross-reference with web archives: many versions of small-magazine sites exist in partial form, and different captures may preserve different pages, images, and navigation structures.

PrimalUrgeMagazine.com