Word: alai
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Laurens was reserved but receptive to his colleagues' cubist ideas, soon began experimenting with painted geometric sculpture. Eventually the female superseded other subject matter. Since Laurens never used models, he was free to invent: an arm became a jai alai basket, limbs were omitted or dramatically extended. If his early cubist works were all angles, taut as strings, his later ones had the liquid rhythm of the sea. That breakthrough came in 1931, when Laurens visited the Mediterranean seacoast. From then on, his sculpture looked as if it had been tumbled in a million waves rather than shaped...
...nation, after 18 years of independence, is an odd admixture of Spanish and American cultures. Crew-cut kids in pastel hot-rods drag for beers along Manila's broad, sleepy Roxas Boulevard. In the back streets, men smoking fat, green cigars bet on cockfights and hard-fought jai alai matches. One church has "Ave Maria" picked out in electric lights above the door. Manila's eleven daily newspapers (six in English) crackle with scare headlines reporting the latest murders, rapes and pirate raids (which still occur at a rate of one a week, conducted by Moros in motorized...
...swimming. No golf. No jai alai. No race tracks. No gambling at all. Everybody in at 11:30. Lights out at 12, and radios off. There'll be a 7:30 call for everybody, and everybody better look like a Yankee. No walking around in blue jeans, and no shorts...
...Come On, Choo Choo!" Florida's six jai alai frontons tempt fans with drinks, dinners, dames-and enough pageantry to make Nero jealous. At the world's biggest (capacity: 6,000) and costliest ($4,500,000) fronton in suburban Miami, customers do not even have to leave their upholstered seats to get taken to the cleaners-pretty girls in green and gold uniforms prance up and down the aisles collecting bets...
...alai is no game for amateurs -and the life of a pelotari is short as well as happy. After a few years, shoulders and arms are noticeably deformed by the strain, and biceps bulge almost as large as Sonny Listen's. Few professionals risk playing past 35. When their legs tire and their reflexes slow down, they are likely to catch a pelota where it hurts-like Erdoza, a Basque champion of the World War I era, who was known as "El Fenomeno" until he put a little extra on a forehand one day and wound up whistling through...