The Bosporus Star

The Girl From Haifa is never pushy, and her calm watchfulness is something you miss were you ever regularly in her company. Still, the Girl From Haifa, a secular modern girl, has suffered the strong Israeli sun on some Friday or Saturday after all public transit has stopped in observance of religious law.

And as a girl who appreciates the positive effects touched off occasionally by her sex, and who can tell you about boarding an elevator full of bearded fundamentalists only to have them face the wall muttering the prophylactic Hebrew which they believe protects them from bodily materializations of female immodesty, she can surprise you with a rare un-Christian remark when talk turns to religious affairs, especially those of her own demographic. If you listen hard to her description of Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) town, not far from Tel Aviv, you can just make out her disapproval of a realm where you will never see giant advertisements proclaiming Victoria’s Secrets underwear, but may visit a women-only department store where you will never see a hapless husband or boyfriend, looking sheepish or bored, forced along on a shopping spree.

Still, the Girl From Haifa was outwardly serene (and beautiful, she’d want you to know), reading in the New York Times an account of a riotous protest of ultra Orthodox factions against government interference in their dispute over whether slightly less-observant, mostly darker-skinned Sephardic, ultra-Orthodox students should be allowed to mix with the properly observant Ashkenazi (generally of some East European ancestry) ultra-Orthodox. Scanning the accompanying image by Ariel Schalit—a young Ultra-Orthodox hanging from a post amidst a sea of black hats— she was silent, until she noticed the small dots studding the top of one building in the distance were in fact, even more onlookers. This perceptual phenomenon exceeding even the Girl From Haifa’s reserves of circumspection, prompted from her an unintelligible sound of displeasure with a faint note perhaps, of disgust.

Certain architects, like Colin Glennie and Jon Kirschenfeld, and Le Corbusier might free-associate back some thirty-five years ago to Peter Eisenmann’s Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies on West 41st. Street where Rem Koolhaas was one of the young Turks along with Mario Gandelsonas and Michael Graves and the New York Five. At the time Koolhaas was exploring some polemic about a floating swimming pool, whose locomotion, he maintained, was ironically, a function of its members swimming towards the land they hoped to escape. On one wall of the Institute was hung a sequence of drawings progressing from a single pool on the water, viewed from above, to several, to a multitude, swarming a pier.

The Girl From Haifa isn’t that into architecture, (what matters to her mainly is having a dry, safe place to receive the endless, antidotal demonstrations of love she needs to counter the low number of hugs when she was small). Always alert, she does appreciate, with a smile, the intersection of abstract phenomena.