Maxim August 2015

WANT TO GET OUT OF HERE? I think about it all the time— making a mysterious exit. Just running off, ditching everything, hitting the open road, and starting over. Sometimes even a little break from life’s routines is enough relief. A few stolen moments of freedom. For me, weekend road trips with no real destination in mind remedy the everyday stress of the week. I go as often as I can. My favorite move is just driving upstate to nowhere certain. I have no idea what’s in store, but I am never disappointed by what I discover. That’s the feeling we set out to capture in this issue: a sense of discovery and abandon. It’s a notion Lewis knows all too well. Echoing the now-famous story of Rodriguez, the mysterious…

YEARS AGO, I WAS RESPONSIBLE for what I guess you’d call a “Negroni-related incident.” We were shooting an episode in Tuscany, the whole crew staying together at a very nice villa. Having only recently been introduced by Mario Batali to the delights of this Florentine cocktail, I got the bright idea to make a pitcher of them for the crew. The recipe seemed to invite it: One bottle Campari. One bottle sweet vermouth. One bottle gin. Blood oranges were in season, so I used them for garnish. Well, those things hit you like a freight train after four or five, and I dimly recall staggering into the kitchen to find one of my cameramen passed out on the floor at a very awkward angle with his head stuck in the…

OVER THE CENTURIES, travel has become one of the world’s largest industries. But until the ’60s, this strange form of human behavior was always shrouded in an atmosphere of high culture and moral improvement; its real motives were hushed up. The English novelist E.M. Forster suggested—in his early novels about travelers in Italy—that frustrated, repressed upper-class English people really went to Italy not to examine churches and relics but to find love and sex. “One doesn’t come to Italy for niceness,” one of his characters admits. “One comes for life.” A polite euphemism for getting laid. Freud was of the opinion that sex and railway travel always went together (the incessant rocking motion?). But the same could be said for any form of whimsical wandering. The Grand Tour in the…

APPLEBY’S VISAGE IS ROUND, even cherubic. His eyes widen, and he’ll flash a fluorescent smile every time he gets excited about a topic of discussion. Which is often. But you’ll have to take my word for it—at least for now. The 23-year-old singer-rapper from Chicago, who has drawn comparisons to the Weeknd both for his velvety voice and the mystery he cultivates, refuses to be photographed. In fact, he has so far managed to keep his true identity a complete secret. In pictures, Appleby’s face is obscured by a hood or a hat, or tucked underneath an overcoat. But right now, at Chicago’s Classick Studios, he’s completely present—every garrulous, goofy inch of him. “Yo! How’s it going, my man?” Appleby bellows, all wide-toothed smile and chirpy, come-here-bro charm, wrapping me…

THERE’S THIS WORD that enlightened fitness buffs love: functional. Strapping your hands to a 400-pound barbell and hoisting that bastard over your head? That’s not functional; that’s just training a set of muscles to do a certain motion over and over again. “If you fall from a tree and you need to grab a branch with one hand,” Paul Duke says, “and you were using straps at a gym? Well, your grip isn’t going to be that great, and you will fall.” Duke will not fall, though. Duke can grab that branch with one hand and dangle like the world’s beefiest monkey. He can do this because his grip is crushing. Because he and his workout partner, Jacob Peacock, exercise in an actual tree. Because that is functional. Along Venice…

“YOU MIGHT W ANT TO SIT DO WN,” Mike Woods tells me. I recline in an office chair, and a moment later, after whizzing through a space-time tunnel that looks like a tornado made of pure light, I find myself standing on a beach in Hawaii. The colors are vivid and rich, the sunlight dappled. The sound of waves echoes in my ears, palms sway in the wind, and the wide ocean sparkles to the horizon. I am alone. I feel an immediate sense of calm. It’s uncanny, but I would swear my skin is growing warm in the sunlight and a faint breeze is carrying a mist off the water. My heartbeat begins to slow. But as I crane my neck to check the trees for coconuts, the landscape…