Clean, Well-lit Fast Food

The dark of early hours isolates the Kellström farmhouse from the universe.

This is why the three Kellströms sitting together in the kitchen form a microcosm, while also serving as a Petri dish.

It isn’t that Emie Kellström isn’t a good housekeeper– far from.

Of the utmost importance is the Kellström kitchen must be understood as a “clean, well-lit” “place”.

Every bit as much as Edward Hopper’s diner, where the Nighthawks dine, or sip, (but it is a diner, not a sipper), is a “clean, well-lit” “place”, in Chicago, but it could be in NYC, Omaha– anywhere?

Every bit as much as Ernest Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lit Place features a clean, well-lit place.

Every bit as much as when you eat at McDonalds, you eat in a clean, well-lit place, if dining inside.

(A great thing about McDonalds was, in the good old days, outside seating was provided. There was, for the outside seating, plastic chairs, around a plastic table– all of which cemented concretely into the concrete, cementing relationships into a permabond, of an “island”, amidst an asphalt parking lot.)

I call that a Parisan sidewalk cafe. Amidst a sweet solemn glow, let in the light, as a freedom fight, as a ring of chanting, chiming, a wind through sidewalks venting; McDonalds picked up on what was happening in Paris and the guys in “advertising” or “moodraking” or chime, chant, rhyme to Vespers, processing it, taking the good while leaving the bad, to make rad, Angel or gargoyle of the morning.