Hula Palace Salon

The Hula Palace began as a magnificent loose collection of artists, cowboys, gypsy’s, crystal queens, sailors,

photographers, lovely ladies,

&

belly dancers with snakes,

mystics, scholars, historians, singers, actors, decorators, sexual warriors, politicians,

Etta ErLinda Lentils Carne and a Hair Suit Princess with no Peas,

located at the corner of  19^th Street

@ 590 Castro Street,

 in San Francisco, California.

Early in 1973 the name Hula Palace was chosen for our children of the night household of silly paper dolls who were a quasi-human quantum leap between the counter cultures, as we exploded on to a collapsing disheveled world of experimental joy to bloom and die like a rose.

The Hula Palace intimate relationship to the Cockettes, Sylvester, Angels of Light, the Lavender Star Players, Jim Campbell, Martin Worman and the Gallery Theater Company, Winston Tong, Tuxedomoon, the Goddess of the Beats ruth weiss and the Upper Market Street artists Demertire Kabbaz, Wayne Quinn and Richard Armstrong, gave us a ready stable of artists and performers for what was soon to become the Hula Palace Salons.

Our identity was dramatically announced during an argument by the glamorous writer Iory Allison in a five to four vote of screaming queens, the Hula Palace won over a tawdry 2^nd place “Five Star Dude Ranch”, which sounded more like we were in engaged in the oldest profession somewhere outside Reno, when we were more than happy to offer impossible & fleeting romance for free. 

Except for the urban location, the Hawaiian Matson Line motif was not very far from the paradise in our minds & because this show boat of a flat was in the magical city,

Baghdad-by-the-Bay we had salt water.

The City that had produced many vibrant sub-cultures in the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s, not to mention the excitement of Etta dressed as a fluffy chicken singing Jeannette McDonald’s “San Francisco” on the corner for loose change to feed homeless boys and bed them.

 In any case we were just its latest Nuevo chichi niche of exotic immigrants that fell through one of the black holes of make believe eternal realities on to

The Barbary Coast…!

The first of the Hula Palace Salons dedicated to the arts was themed with cosmic joy and took place on Winter Solstice in the Galactic Center constellation of Ophiuchus. It proved to be such a success & was so much fun, food fight and all; that we continued for to produce events with each turn of the sun & moon along with a touch of the Chinese

I Ching thrown in for guidance.

We searched through concepts that were the here-&-now of anything juxtaposed, to sing a song of what was beyond the event horizon into

an immediate unknown.

Living in San Francisco at that time could be very expensive for children such as us, unemployed.  Yet our household was able to pool limited resources to host increasing larger events, after all we paid nearly $150 a month for a mere

14 rooms.

Our main asset was a wonderfully articulated top floor with many small rooms, five of which were oversized including a double parlor which was used for performances, art classes & lectures. The Palace was furnished in an elegant late thrift store plantation manner with fiesta ware, hand bags, make-up, vintage costumes & other unmentionables plus sparkling relics tucked away so they wouldn’t be stolen by the riff raft that often attended our galas, plus lidded baskets for the snakes.

This way we could languish in the decadence of pure spirit & not have to kill anyone.

In September of 1975 we staged an elegant break through Salon, The Joyous Lake, from the Chinese hexagram Tui, The Joyous Lake. By then attendance of performances had overflowed capacity. For the first time people had to be turned away at the door step & some of us just had to become invisible. The performance dimension became a sweet hot ticket. Les Plush the astrologer to the Cockette's & a performer of meta-art facilitated the performances.

It all became to much for his sensitive nature & he moved out of San Francisco to a mountain top retreat for solace but continued as swami of timing and established our intellectual foundation.

In 1976 we produced two additional Salons on Castro Street before the flat was just too small to accommodate the popularity of the events on the underground circuit and with the increase of up-town museum and gallery directors who loved to slip into the salon for their brush with the edge we all had to move on…!

The Salons continued with HRH Lee Mentley aka The Princess, who was curator of the visual arts and believed if you were not living on the edge of an abyss you were taking up too much space. Lee moved the events to a disheveled civic center building behind the Opera House & funded the new operation by the

San Francisco Arts Commission.

The Princess began to renovate and stage exhibits and salons as director of the Top Floor Gallery along with Adrian Craig, Jim Campbell, Nikki Schrader and Jimmy Coker, which included Black Mountain artists, Robert Opel’s Fey Way Gallery artists, Lou Rudolph from the Ambush and many of the South of Market erotic masters, the political art of the emerging punk & new wave street artists along with

outstanding photographers,

Steven Arnold, Crawford Barton, Jeff Clark, Rink, Guy Cory, Ed Hart, Steven Arnold

Danny Nicoletta & the sultry Ms. Perez

The controversial 330 Grove Street building was a three story 50,000 square foot building made from red bricks in a classical Spanish design from the rubble of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and was originally

“Bear Photography”

330 Grove had become infamous as the place Allen Ginsberg first performed in drag, the home of the Angeles of Light, the Black Light Explosion Dance Company aka some said, The Black Panthers, a rehearsal space for Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane and the rock acts that performed at The Carousel Ballroom which had been located just a few blocks away on

Van Ness and Market Street in the 1960’s. 

Later in the 1980’s, 330 Grove began to present new music concerts from the Punk/New Wave movement with Tuxedomoon, Winston Tong, The Dead Kennedy’s, the Mutants, Black Flag and the Screamers who terrorized opera goers as they scurried by 330 Grove from hunting down limited parking in such a nasty neighborhood to see Carmen or some such dead art.

330 Grove was also rumored by Pride Foundation Executive Director Paul Hardman, from papers he found in the dank basement to be the space where the SLA hid Patty Hearst & a past home of the Black Panthers.

Eventually after the horrid Jim Jones Kool-Aid massacre, George Moscone and Harvey Milk’s assassinations, a dramatic Dan White riot, more pissing on opera goers, the building had a final exhibit of Disposable Art and was itself assassinated by Dianne Feinstein

for her patron Saint at Bank of America.

330 Grove was torn down with the remaining art demolished

& built into a lovely gray concert parking lot for the fearful

Opera-ites and their political hacks…!

We had fallen off the edge, but did manage to save the cat Mimi…!

Darkness fell over San Francisco.

In 1994, The Princess returned under the cover of night from the island of Kaua`i to host a Hula Palace Reunion Salon with the Cockettes, Angeles of Light, Kaliflower and The Goddess of the Beats ruth weiss to memorialize the artists we had loved and lost in the AIDS pandemic and celebrate the art of the past and to present a new edge to a new generation of truth seekers and creative beings.

 To this day the Aloha Spirit of Hula Palace Salons continues as a circle of artists loving their way through many worlds creating new experiences while preserving a string to a delightful history that has left an indelible mark on San Francisco and the art world

for century’s to come...!