richjensen

What great stuff! I wish I had carried just a little bit more money in my pocket when I visited and I would have taken home even more awesome art and furniture. Proprietor Spencer Moody is a Seattle institution with a great eye for soul (at very reasonable prices).

It was Thanksgiving in the early afternoon just after leaving the Southland Tales matinee screening at the Uptown Cinemas. (In an otherwise empty auditorium.) We had a few moments before picking up the child at her Aunt’s. Em wanted a glass of wine, I wanted coffee. The Mecca was across the street from the theater, but no . . .

We wandered a couple of blocks. Nothing else open. Back in the car and to the top of Queen Anne. Crawling along the strip, we see “Beer & Wine” in neon. Looks open. That’s how we first stumbled into El Diablo. The room was appointed in what I think of as the mexican style, bright yellows and oranges with dancing devil murals everywhere. The staff seemed knowing, non chalant but also attentive. There was a social vibe I associate occasionally with Los Angeles: a feeling of being within the intimate aura of casual power. One can’t escape the new tech wealth that has settled in that neighborhood and on this holiday morning in this room we were the ones free of the hearth in a populist cafe drinking decent wine and well prepared coffee and deli food among the foreign accents (I’m including New York tones among these) and skin-tight jean-casings on the beautiful, petulant skeleton people. I dug it.

Was just last night in the last evening sunlight after a scrumptious dinner date with my spouse. I absolutely love it. It felt like the first, open, intelligent public space in Seattle. It made me think Seattle has not only become a city but has a chance at being fun, generous, amorous, sharp-witted and mentally capable of metaphor. LOVELOVELOVE the abstracted natural forms, the fibonacci sequences, the river/gutter, mountain/cone, rushing water in to placid pool. Awesome Awesome Awesome. I’m eager to learn more about the designer and see what has been written about this place. There are many similarities to be drawn to Freeway Park (30 years old this year) and there are also a number of distinctions. The surfaces here are generally smoothed toward abstraction, while the breton brut surfaces of Freeway Pary are all rough, bearing the imprints of their lost timber-form castings. In Freeway Park, natural resources from the region were cast in stone, mummified and re-animated with monsterous literalism. A forest turned to stone. At Cal Anderson, the fountain instead celebrates the formal Platonic source-codes from which nature itself is a synthetic product. This is how life operates in the mind and why this place fills me with fun and hope.

Also, and especially, I dig that the prohibitions, DON’T CLIMB ON THEFOUNTAIN, DON’T GO IN THEWATER, are printed on tiny little signs that the first time visitor, filled with joyous abandon, is likely to miss. I’m so happy to see this wink-wink speakeasy-like administrative technique institutionalized in a space nominally owned by the Seattle publis. It reeks of civilization, justice and again, hope.