Do not disturb: Hotels are great cultural breeding grounds

According to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Grand Hotel: Redesigning Modern Life exhibit, the hotel is not just a place where you crash, order room service and watch CNN. It’s also a breeding ground for culture. Over the years a number of works have been conceived, completed and/ or tweaked in — and been inspired by — hotels ( though, apparently, not many Holiday Inns). Here are a few.

• Tannhauser — In 1875, Richard Wagner composed and rearranged the main parts of this opera for a performance in Vienna while staying at that city’s Hotel Imperial.

• Eloise — The children’s book character got into all sorts of trouble while living on the top floor of New York’s Plaza Hotel.

• Naked Lunch — William S. Burroughs cut ‘ n’ pasted his ode to the Interzone while staying at New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a favourite of the Beats. Jack Kerouac also wrote On the Road at the famed establishment.

• In the Hall of the Mountain King — Duke Ellington conceived his arrangement of Edvard Grieg’s composition in the 1950s while at the Château Marmont in Los Angeles.

• Grievous Angel — In the late ’ 60s, pioneering country- rock musician Gram Parsons used his room at the Château Marmont as a rehearsal space for his debut solo album GP, and the posthumous release Grievous Angel.

• Poses — Rufus Wainwright battled a meth addiction and wrote much of his 2001 album Poses while staying at the Chelsea.

• Chelsea Hotel # 2 — The Leonard Cohen song is about the singer’s encounter with Janis Joplin at the hotel.

• Chelsea Girls — Andy Warhol and Paul Morrisey directed this 1966 three- hour film about Warhol’s Factory regulars — although apparently one regular, Edie Sedgwick, didn’t make the final cut ( and the socialite accidentally set fire to her Chelsea room later that year).

• 2001: A Space Odyssey — Arthur C. Clarke wrote the 1968 novel ( developed concurrently with the Stanley Kubrick movie) while staying at the Chelsea.

• Barton Fink — Much of the 1991 Coen Bros. movie takes place in the fictional Hotel Earle — which, the filmmakers have said, was based on a hotel they’d seen in Austin, Texas, that made an impression on them. And not in a good way.