Sommaire pour August 2015 de Maxim

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…

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…

Sea Made from a single sheet of pre-creased, corrugated polypropylene, the 12-foot-long, 25-inch-wide Oru Bay+ kayak breaks down into a 28-pound, portfolio-style case that’s small enough to sling over a shoulder, stow behind a couch, or check on a plane. The single-passenger vessel takes about 20 minutes to assemble and is as nimble on the water as its more unwieldy, noncollapsible counterparts. And despite its take-anywhere design, the Bay+ is equipped with an adjustable bucket seat, strap-down deck rigging, and waterproof deck hatch, making it suitable for even the most intrepid multiday tours. $1,575; orukayak.com Air First class feeling a bit too cramped? Then pilot the Icon A5, an amphibious light aircraft that can be hitched to a car and take off from just about anywhere. Articulating wings fold flat…

WHEN YOU SEE JAMIE BELL IN THIS SUMMER’S FANTASTIC FOUR, he’ll be that great hulking thing—called Thing—covered head to toe in rocklike material and towering over the other cast members at 6'8". It’s quite a look for Bell, 29, who arrives for breakfast in New York looking slim, sharpfeatured, and lively, though he confesses he’s still recovering from the celeb-studded Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute gala two nights prior. “I feel like I’ve aged since I’ve been here,” he says with a groan. It may seem odd to watch Bell, who pirouetted to fame in the critically acclaimed film Billy Elliot, lumbering and smashing his way through one of the Marvel blockbuster tentpoles of the summer. Then again, we never thought we’d see little Billy whipping a bottomless Charlotte Gainsbourg with…

ONCE UPON A TIME, motorcycles were cool. This was pre-Fonz, before computer-aided design, wind tunnels, and, some would say, fear. They were simple machines, barely more than two wheels and a motor, built by men with greasy hands and unkempt hair for the sole purpose of going fast. Then the industry grew up. Today’s bikes are safer and stronger, and they don’t need constant maintenance. Unfortunately, that comfort made us soft. Between retirees farting along on bedazzled La-Z-Boys and dude brahs riding high on their neon-green crotch rockets, the bike has blown a gasket. What’s a romantic to do? For years we haunted eBay in search of a discarded gem. But recently, the manufacturers behind the grand bikes of old have cast a forlorn glance backward and rediscovered the design…

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…

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…

ABOUT AN HOUR INTO DRINKS WITH EMILY DIDONATO, I REALIZE I saw her just the other day. Not quite like this—I mean, it’s not so often that I find myself casually sitting in a restaurant with a beyond-gorgeous supermodel who regularly poses on exotic beaches for world-class fashion photographers. No, I spotted her in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood early one morning. There was a phalanx of young women with headsets and clipboards, guys holding giant lights, craft service tables with limp salad. They were shooting a commercial. An assistant stopped me at a barricade as filming was about to start. Silence, and then…“Action!” In front of two giant whirring fans, the camera encircled a girl in heels who glided with magnificent speed across the cobblestones of Greene Street, her mesmerizing gait…

I’m perched on the edge of a simple thatched-roof shelter on the remote Indonesian island of Siroktabe, staring down an immaculate white beach as the sun dips westward into the Indian Ocean, shocking the sky a glorious orange-pink. I feel good. Great, in fact. I am the only human being for miles. I am supposedly here to be tested, to survive. But here, now, surrounded by the earth’s rich bounty, I think: This isn’t surviving. This is living. BACK UP A COUPLE OF WEEKS. THERE IS A SMALL COMPANY IN HONG Kong, Docastaway, that specializes in dropping people on desert islands in Asia, Oceania, or Central America to survive by their own wits for as long as they want to, or can bear it. (They also offer “comfort” packages, featuring…

1. Get a tattoo 2. Be bribed by a Cambodian policeman 3. Drive across the country 4. Use toys and handcuffs during sex 5. Have sex outside 6. Drive down the East Coast with a cat in the car 7. Have sex on his outdoor balcony 8. Backpack through Peru and Bolivia 9. Bike all over Manhattan, falling 10. Have sex in a wave pool in broad daylight 11. Let him bench-press me 12. Have sex at a wedding 13. Have a threesome 14. Sleep in the bed of my Ford truck on the side of the road in the Florida Keys for three days, barhopping 15. Have sex in a public library 16. Sneak out of a corporate summit to skinny-dip in the ocean 17. Have sex outside my…

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…

“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…

MEREDITH HAGNER IS READY TO RAMBLE. The North Carolina–bred actress—now seen in Woody Allen’s Irrational Man—currently resides in Brooklyn’s bustling Williamsburg neighborhood, but she’s always plotting her next adrenaline-pumping getaway. “I just have that curiosity and desire to experience other cultures, and I love to challenge myself to go off the beaten path,” Hagner says. Take, for example, her recent monthlong road trip across Vietnam. “I hiked a lot in the north and stayed with villagers, and then I tore through the central highlands on the back of a motorcycle for two weeks, which was amazing,” she says. This summer Hagner is backpacking through California’s Yosemite National Park, after scrapping a planned surfing-and-camping excursion down Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. (“I realized it was going to be 115 degrees, and I was…

THE VOICE ON THE TRACK IS MOURNFUL. THE LYRICS ARE MUMBLED and hard to make out, but it’s easy to recognize the feeling. The name of the song, “I Thought the World of You,” says it all. This is the sound of a pain that cannot be reconciled. The singer is looking back on another life, deeply sad, piecing together how it all went wrong. He called himself Lewis. People clearly remembered the man who’d booked the Music Lab Studios in Los Angeles one afternoon in 1983, laid down 10 tracks over the course of a few days, and then vanished without a trace. They agreed on a few particulars: He was tall and good-looking, his thick blond hair parted neatly on the left. He had a beautiful girlfriend. He…