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LYNN EMANUEL
Noir Food
Martinis, filets and cigarettes, tea sandwiches with
butter and matted
snarls of watercress, coffee silky with sugar and coffee black that
stares at you like that dark eyed hound in mama's kitchen . . . all that
gray
diner stuff, the egg's gray iris looking up from a frizzled mat of hash.
The food looks suspicious, it looks guilty, slippery, and why not? It's
cooked
by men in wraparound aprons. There seems to be no motive to this cooking;
it's all a hodgepodge of half tones sliding by on a conveyor belt called
three squares a day. On the plate the T-bone slowly bleeds to death.
The coconut cream's little pill box hat, sleek and dewy, beside the mince
pie's
downtrodden, flat fedora. Only a couple of things are clear: the ceiling's
bare
bulb is clear and perfect as a hard-boiled egg. Martinis, filets, cigarettes,
a cobbler's dark clottedness looks like a hemorrhage in a bowl. A block
of Stilton's gangrenous and veined. It's a good thing we're tough.
It's a hard and dirty world.
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