Lodging a Go-Go

See the waitress down there?” From the undulating third-floor balcony of his Standard hotel, Andre Balazs points out an impossibly chic employee sashaying across a sea of blue AstroTurf. She delivers refreshments this bright afternoon in knee-high disco boots and a shimmering Mylar-like skirt. Balazs, for his part, is particularly excited about the blouse. “It has an almost parachute fabric,” he says, enthusiasm lighting his hazel eyes and deepening the cleft in his chin. “The collar’s up. There’s a kind of Barbarella, futuristic aspect to it.”

Across Sunset Boulevard at the Chateau Marmont, Balazs has overhauled a hale L.A. landmark with a respect for Hollywood tradition that borders on religious. At the Standard, open since April, he has remade the Golden Crest retirement home into a place of wry, ironic winks.

As Balazs is fond of saying, “the Standard isn’t.” Dominating half the lobby is a cube of sandy shag rug swallowing the floor, wall and ceiling. Sofas as wrinkled as Shar-Peis are deployed among enormous squishy black olives fit for straddling. Behind the front desk is a huge empty aquarium, where performance artists can sleep, writhe or whatever. A deejay is spinning out rhythmic throbs. “You can’t just say, ‘Oh, I’ll put in this tape or put on this selection of CDs,’ and wash your hands of it as if that was enough,” Balazs scoffs. “It’s not!”

On the pool deck, coin-operated binoculars, the kind that are bolted to the Empire State Building, can be aimed either at the flats of Los Angeles toward the south or into any of the Standard’s 140 units due north. No salon graces the hotel. Instead there’s a branch of Rudy’s Barber Shop--”fast cuts, no nicks”--which, in addition to dispensing $15 buzz jobs, sex toys, Lemon Heads and Junior Mints, has visiting tattoo artists in residence.

“I was just telling someone about the craziness that goes on in hotels,” Balazs confides. “You get these wonderful reactions. You get more love affairs. You get more tragedies. It’s sort of like every extreme of human behavior seems to play itself out on the stage of a good hotel.”

In the Standard, Balazs has assembled a stage more conducive to craziness than most Marriotts, Holiday Inns or other chain depots offering rooms at $95 a night and up. “Let’s say you’re 28 years old, and you’re on your second or third job out of school,” Balazs says. “You get sent out and you’re told you’ve got $100, $120 per day to live on. And yet, you’re probably more sophisticated than most in terms of cultural awareness, music, fashion. Everything that you live and breathe is highly cultured. And what are your choices in that price range? A Ramada Inn which looks like the Ramada Inn everywhere.”

For this dull uniformity, the traveling hipster has no less an eminence than Baron Conrad Hilton to thank. “After the Second World War and the Korean War, the world was a dangerous place,” Balazs says. “The American businessman, because it always was a man, wanted to go to Beirut, Berlin and Boston, and each time settle into something familiar. Today, I think that’s lost its charm, and yet no one has gone back and come up with something new.”

“I’m just amazed by how little people care about the sophistication of the young market in the hotel industry,” he says. “I mean, every other industry is totally geared toward catering toward it.”

When the industry finally begins to orient itself toward the Pokemon set, Balazs is fairly confident it will do so incompetently--through a profusion of pseudo-chic clutter. “In the near future of hotels, you are going to see a big shift in large corporations becoming design crazy,” he warns. “They’re going to believe that the way of addressing a new market is by designing, by hiring designers and laying on more stuff, but that really is just a reiteration of changing colors from red to green every other year. Regardless of who the designer is, it’s just another version of the same thing.”

In the Standard, with its pad Thai comfort food and sex gadgets and tattoo services and T1 high-speed data lines, Balazs posits the next-century hotelier as cultural anthropologist. “The real future is paying attention to those things that are much more tribe-oriented,” he says. “I like to think that people move in tribes. And speaking the language of the tribes, focusing upon the human element, is going to become more and more and more important. It’s not about laying on more soaps--more junk.”

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Mini Breakdown

The Standard’s accommodations include officially licensed Andy Warhol curtains, a silver beanbag chair and an inflatable love seat by French IKEA, regularly puffed up by chamber people with pneumatic pumps. In the ashtray, a matchbook from Hollywood Bailbonds assures guests that “freedom is only a phone call away”; the climate-control faceplate urges, “Blow hard; harder.” But it is behind the door of the mini-bar refrigerator that Balazs’ hospitality obsessions reach operatic heights. Below, an inventory:

* Go-Go Drinks: Sexy, Express, Bliss, BuzzKill, Passion

* Aromatherapy candles in prescription canisters: ylang-ylang, patchouli, vanilla sandalwood, grapefruit cinnamon

* The Standard’s “S” box containing Gold Coin metallic blue condoms, silver clothespins, Astroglide lubricant bubbles and white silk mask

* Vaseline

* Black licorice whips

* Red licorice whips

* Hapi party mix

* King-size peanut M&M;’s

* Nabisco animal crackers

* Newman’s Own pretzels

* Cracker Jacks

* Hershey’s bar

* Heide Gummi Bears

* Kettle organic potato chips

* PowerBars

* Oreos

* Hollywood chewing gum *Devil Girl red hots

* Glaceau mineral water (“smart water” with eletrolytes)

* Veryfine juice

* Tazo iced tea

* Sapporo

* Hakutsuru sake

* Red wine (half-bottle ofCarmenet Dynamite Cabernet, Northern California)

* White wine (Murphy Goode Chardonnay, Northern California)

* Champagne (Veuve Cliquot)

* Liquor (minis of Skyy Vodka, Jack Daniel’s, Jose Cuervo Tequila, Johnnie Walker Red, Campari, Tanqueray Gin)