Hang onto your nachos. Get a good grip on your beer mug. There’s a new magazine about drinkables, edibles and leisure time on the market and it’s got weird stuff on its menu.
Well, weird by the standards of Gourmet, Food & Wine, The Wine Spectator or any magazine I can think of. Juice: The Journal of Eatin’, Drinkin’ and Screwin’ Around isn’t a how-to magazine; It’s about the gestalt of things we put into our mouths.
There isn’t a lavish photograph of food or wine in its entire 60 pages. Juice is instead filled with eye-catching drawings and illustrations–most very wonderful–that, by food/wine magazine standards, verge on the hallucinogenic.
A bimonthly, Juice also contains very few recipes. In fact, it’s heavy on ads and freewheeling text about the liquid aspects of life–beer-drinking women, booze and guns, Irish whiskey, a fellow who has a suit made entirely of beer cans, barley wine, and a many-paneled cartoon centering on the adventures of a weaselly animal named Puffy. Puffy likes whiskey and cigarettes.
“Betel Freakin”‘ is a guide to betel-nut chewing, a subject definitely not covered in my last issue of Cooks Illustrated. Betel nut, which acts as an uplifting drug, is popular in Asia.
And, what’s this? A short story? Yes, about a Southern pie-eating championship. Next to it is a poem revolving around a crashed car, tobacco, beer, a man, a woman and love.
Fred Dodsworth, late of Beer, The Magazine, began working on Juice last November from a basement room in Berkeley, Calif. The magazine’s operations share space with a macaw and an electric guitar that Dodsworth strums to fill pauses in telephone conversations, which are few because he talks as fast as his new magazine looks.
Like Juice, Dodsworth is full of a sort of cheery, demented energy. He promises a magazine that will discuss food and drink in ways no other magazine does.
“We’re going after `just folks,’ people who like food and drink and not the whole gourmet hoi polloi. Not people who have a million bucks and perfect china. We won’t be having any ads for Spode (a fine china). We’re for people who enjoy life!” Dodsworth says.
Cohorts on the venture are Chick Wolf, identified in the masthead as “el loco lobo hisself” and Neil McGoldrick, “the mad bad ad demon.” Contributors come from far and wide–as close as his friends in Berkeley’s literary community to as far as Corby Kummer, a well-known food writer for Atlantic Monthly who is contributing a piece on coffee for the next issue.
Dodsworth, who has a journalism career that includes a Bay Area business magazine and a community newspaper in San Francisco, refers to himself as Juice’s “freditor.”
He concedes that Juice has only “about 24 subscribers,” but already has nationwide distribution through Barnes & Noble bookstores. He’s looking to build a subscription base and says he’s been approached (hasn’t everybody?) about putting the whole magazine on-line.
In shaping Juice, Dodsworth says, he’s applying the concepts of an avant garde, 1970s “gourmet bathroom” magazine called Wet.
“The stories in Wet could be about anything or anyone at all just so, somewhere in there, the subject made a passing reference to his or her bathroom,” he says.
That’s the case in Juice, although most of the articles aren’t that oblique. Some are disappointing.
The first issue includes a question-and-answer session with Alice Waters. She’s the now-legendary founder of Berkeley’s Chez Panisse and a mover and shaker in what we now call California cuisine. She’s deep into other movements (organic everything, eating in season, hormone-free milk, baby beets, chefs testifying before House and Senate committees in D.C., etc.)
Here’s Juice’s headline–or is it the first sentence? Graphically, it’s hard to tell–for the Waters piece:
“Every time you shell out 65 bucks for a tiny plate of artful, organic something, she’s to blame.”
Then, despite a great caricature of Waters, the article goes flat, fawning and all-serious.
Hey, freditor, can’t I read that everywhere else?
Juice is sold at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Diversey Avenue for $5 a copy. To subscribe, call 800-604-5842 or fax a six-issue subscription request to 510-548-4414. Six issues cost $19.95.
