- Bleach
When something gets dirty and you try to bleach it clean, it never goes back to the exact same whiteness. It becomes a whitewashed substance, one whose molecules have been altered in reaction to another aggressive substance, a verb that incorporates a desperate action, an attempt to correct a mistake, to go back in time, but forever carrying the stain.
This attempt to erase the mistake stinks a little.
it has the same stench of , a gorgeous, seemingly clean and refreshingly cool pool that faintly reeks of bleach. bleach that is put their to erase the dirty physicality of multiple other users.
2. Kiryat Ata
We grew up in Kiryat Ata in a house that was too big. On Friday nights, my father would lay a blanket down on the lawn and read us a chapter from Stephen King’s “It”. The terrifying clown would enter the house through the drain in the sink, speak to kids in a hoarse and sexy voice, lure them down and murder them. At night I would stare at the house, the lights in the windows blinking on and off like a choreographed and timed demonstration of the ghosts hidden in the corridors and empty rooms.
The house always contained dark places. We would sit down to dinner with those places all around us, beneath and above just black, empty spaces: the basement, bedrooms, attic, the gnome room, the pathway around the house, the driveway.
As I said, we were too small for that house.
We filled it as best we could with the limited, transient warmth of our bodies, our paltry presence. The rest of the space was taken up by the lack. In retrospect, I know I hated that house. Each night I would sneak into my parents’ bedroom with a blanket and pillow, and sleep beside them on the carpet.
3. The Basment Tapes / Large, empty Villa’s
A few days ago I heard Sue Klebold, the Columbine shooter’s mother, talking on NPR and describing the horror she felt watching the video tapes the police found in her house. The tapes clearly show her sweet son transforming into a monster down there in the basement of their home. The parents would be sitting upstairs with friends, while their son went down to the basement, changed his clothes, collected weapons and planned with his best friend the mass murder they would commit. It all happened in that basement space, while his parents were home and never noticed a thing.
4. “Ungarin Houses”
A friend of mine lives in one of the Ungarin houses in the neighborhood of Meah She’arim in Jerusalem. The interior of the house as immaculately clean and tidy as the inside of a ….. The eleven family members share the fifty square meters, the rooms in constant use throughout all hours. At night, four of the children sleep on the porch on a shared mattress, taking turns using the best spot. They roll up the mattress in the morning and the tiny space becomes a sewing room, as the mother sews beautiful caftans for their livelihood. The second room is shared by five children, with beds spread out each evening and then folded back up the next morning. There is no “mine”. No one has their own bed, or drawer, or toys. The room door is decorated with a beautiful sign, made by one of the kids, that presents the rota for toys, just like a library. The house is very small, and as it is constantly filled with family members, it is almost empty of possessions.
Due to the narrow confines, and thanks to the genius design of the neighborhood around a large internal yard, children can be outside at all hours. The yard is vibrant with life. Neighborhood residents come and go, children play, laundry lines are hung everywhere. Each apartment opens directly to the yard, so the children are never alone. There are always some adults keeping an eye on things.
The Ungarin houses are an exemplary Jerusalemite demonstration of the New York architectural tales told by Jane Jacobs in the 1950s, an architecture that allows its residents to be active participants in the residence, to live within a delicate balance of mutual reliance. These ideas remind me of the neighborhood as depicted in Sesame Street – one street, one tree, one living room for everyone,
If someone behaved badly, Mr. Hooper, the kindly store owner, would intervene.
I was raised on Sesame Street promises –I love the idea of a house that merges out to the street, a neighborhood as an intermediary zone, the extension of your house, a gateway to the big world outside. The doorway that marks the threshold between the wall-to-wall carpet of the interior, to the autumnal leaves scattered on the asphalt of sidewalks that can be drawn on with chalk.
but jane jacobes world changed a lot earlier., of course. Sesame Street was nostalgic even when I was a child..
Malvina Reynolds sang about this change in the ’60s, describing the process of suburbanization and disengagement. People started buying their own washing machines, everyone started doing their own laundry, so there was less need for communal laundromats. everybody bought a car. There was no need for physical closeness to a city center. It was an opportunity to get away to “the countryside”, to a house on its own plot of land. it seemed likeThere was no longer need for neighborhoods, for communities – each family was now on their own, as if it had always been this way.
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
– Malvina Reynolds , 1962
Our architectures come with a set of ideologies – in our area, in most cases the ideology is very simple: The more personal space the better. altered by architecture from co-dependent communities to (seemingly-לכאורה=) individual “residents”. each” tenant” with a room of their own. A discrete and distinct space. The more money you have, the more opportunities to create more secluded and separate spaces. More floors, more rooms, more hallways. We are required to be independent, even when independence is impossible. Children are separated into rooms, the elderly are assigned their own rooms in homes and facilities.
In the series “Stranger Things” (2016), the terror of disappearance, kidnapping and captivity all occur within the unique framework and typology of the villa: a detached house on a large and isolated plot of land. The interior of the house is a farther expression of detachment: isolated rooms separated by corridors. The nightmare is embodied by the house itself. This upside-down hellish scene is a mirror image of the villa, a frozen desert of death. The house is the lair of the monster.
Will’s mother, just returned from a night shift, doesn’t know that Will hasn’t come home. She assumes he is in his room and doesn’t want to intrude. It is only the following morning, when Will doesn’t appear for breakfast, that she decides to disrupt the order and opens his door without permission, suddenly frightened at the sight of a bed neat and unslept in, a sign that Will has disappeared.
5. My Mother
I grew up with a perfect mother. Beautiful, smart, enthusiastic.
On her shelf, among CDs of Phil Collins and Lionel Richie, I found a book that captivated me. I would take and read it time after time. It had illustrations in a light, sweet style, full of scary descriptions of a depressed mother, a messy home, an endless chore list.
The book presented a reality starkly different from the image ofmy own home. Our house was clean and tidy. My parents never fought; they would dance in the living room. My little sister would play clumsy little tunes on the piano. We were three little girls, close in age and evenly spaced, who wore matching purple pajamas each night.
And yet I still knew the book was telling the truth.
