I don’t normally do hotel critiques — that’s very clearly the clone’s gimmick — but I can’t help but note a few… oddities… about the hotel I’m staying at here in San Francisco. Firstly, there’s the fact that they don’t seem to have grasped the idea of this simple little thing called “light bulbs”. This is the darkest hotel I’ve ever stayed in, bar none, and certainly the only one where I’ve had to ask the waiter what each and every dish was, simply because it couldn’t be easily perceived with the naked eye. Very odd indeed.
The “mood” lighting that pervades the Clift Hotel has nothing on the lifts, however. The walls are entirely covered in slightly smoky mirrors, so walking in gives the sensation of greeting fifty copies of yourself in a thick fog. Naturally, it’s somewhat on the dim side, too. Except that, for whatever reason, they’ve opted to tint and light the lifts in either green, purple or blood red, so your fifty clones all appear rather psychedelic. You could shoot a low-budget X-Files episode in the green lift, and as for the red one… well, let’s just say that getting into a blood red, mirrored lift in low light is a very bad idea if you’ve had 40 hours of no sleep, a couple of beers and too many Cherry Cola Daiquiris*.
Naturally, when I take over the world with the help of my army of Siamese Fighting Ants, the first thing I’ll do is send the Clift a big ol’ box of incandescents and a mirror-smashing hammer. All in the name of public service, naturally…
*For the record, when you’re that tired, the exact number of Cherry Cola Daiquiris that equates to “too many” is also equal to one.