Have Canine, Will Travel
Our fur-flung correspondents in dogged pursuit
- By Carey Winfrey
- Smithsonian magazine, March 2006, Subscribe
Photographs of international supermodels gallivanting around Europe aren't our style. But when the model in question has four paws, floppy ears and an inordinate fondness for spaghetti—well, we couldn't resist. Meet Pecorino, an 8-year-old mutt adopted by Vienna-born travel photographer Toni Anzenberger ("Bone Voyage"). The duo have produced several books and calendars together, and Pecorino is such a celebrity that in many European cities people stop him on the street. Anzenberger's photographs are remarkable, with the cheerful pup adding what the photographer calls a "vital touch of interest" to otherwise familiar sights.
Michael Grunwald, a Washington Post reporter whose new book about the Everglades (The Swamp) we excerpt in this issue, has decidedly mixed feelings about South Florida. "It's become such an unnatural place," he says. "They've got levees that are supposed to keep nature out—that separate the cities from the swamp—but last year alone people called alligator control 15,000 times complaining about the reptiles in their backyards. But it's the alligators' backyard!" Then too, South Florida is "75 degrees and beautiful, so of course people are going to want to keep coming. And the problems will just get worse."
Arthur Lubow, a New York City-based writer specializing in the arts, says that Edvard Munch would not be pleased that his best-known work, The Scream, has found its way to the American shopping mall on T-shirts, blow-up dolls and computer mouse pads. "Munch certainly wouldn't have had very nice things to say about these appropriations," says Lubow, who wrote about the artist. Munch, Lubow notes, was an "extremely prolific and restlessly innovative artist" who helped shape modern art. Visiting Munch's native Norway, Lubow was struck by similarities between that nation's "powerfully simple landscape with its curves and ice floes" and the colorful shapes that are Munch's signature. "It really looks like Munch's work," he says.
Keith Kloor went to Utah's remote Range Creek Canyon to report on an astonishing archaeological site formerly owned by a rancher named Waldo Wilcox and recently deeded to the state. But Wilcox turned out to be as much a part of the story as the centuries-old artifacts of the Fremont people who lived there around A.D. 1000. "He is a bundle of contradictions," says Kloor. "He calls himself an old broken-down cowboy, but he loves being in the spotlight."
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