Word: baring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...struggle to distill the building process to its essentials--vertical and horizontal structure, bare but lustrous materials--Mies produced his poetry through painstaking details. He made a fetish of the proper way to expose the steel I beams at the corners of his buildings. As Frank Lloyd Wright also did, Mies exploded the confined rooms of 19th century interior space, producing the open-plan homes and work spaces--"universal space" he called it--that are now pretty much universal...
...every city and suburban office park. What we learned from those is that mediocre Modernism looks even worse than mediocre Victorian. There's less to look at, and what there is, is cheap. But Mies' work was something different. He found a way to make the barest of bare bones sumptuous and even exciting. As Spencer Tracy once said about Katharine Hepburn, "There ain't much meat on her, but what there is, is cherce...
...Bare-knuckle kickboxing doesn't pay much: at fights outside the Thai border town of Mae Sot, the purse is $22 for a Thai winner, $11 for a Burmese, $4 each for a draw?losers get nothing. And the rules are brutally simple. Head-butting, elbowing, kneeing as well as kicking and punching are allowed. Victory is by surrender or straight knockout. If both fighters are still standing after five rounds (or two for kickboxers under 14), it's a draw. There's no count: the two referees' chief purpose is to protect a floored fighter from being stomped...
...Bare-knuckle boxing has been outlawed in Thailand since 1923: too many fighters never awoke from that conclusive knockout, often delivered by a fist of hemp rubbed in ground glass. Nevertheless, tournaments are tolerated, partly because Muay Thai has a place in the country's history. Siamese soldiers perfected the martial art in the 16th century, and Thais have been flooring Burmese since as long ago as the 18th century, when soldier Nai Khanom won his freedom from captors by defeating 12 top Burmese fighters. To this day, many Thais ascribe their status as the sole unconquered Asian nation...
...good dollars for, well, nothing seems to be bordering on the plain loopy. Yet southern Thailand is becoming a hub for a growing number of professionals whose guilty affluence and/or search for the soulful drive them to seek a week or two of deprivation. On offer is bare-board living: fasting, yoga, meditation and?the ultimate in purification?twice daily cleansing of the colon...