Tag: 24 hours of happy

24 Hours of Happy 9:00 pm to

I found the document! I still can reach it through the OpenOffice app that I used to write it.

Now to give Mr. Williams some money. He’s apparently gotten big in the shoe design business lately. So I’m probably going to just pretty much do all Pharrell Williams branded athletic shoes from here on out. The highest rated of these on Amazon is these, described as adidas Pw Tennis Hu Mens Trainers (sic). I have no idea what the “Hu” means, but the “Pw” is pretty clearly Pharrell Williams.

Now, on to the post:

9:00 Have we moved? We suddenly are in a strip mall with an ACE Cash Express and a Subway. There’s some kind of a cell phone store. I can see the word “Galaxy” through the window. Does Samsung have stores like Apple does?

It looks like it’s downtown. There’s a CVS back there.

Wait. There’s an H&R Block. I think we’re in the same strip mall that we were in at 8:00. We just passed a Time Warner office. Yeah, we’ve got to be in the same strip mall. Other strip malls might have the same stores, but in the same order? That’s stretching credulity, I think.

9:04 We’ve moved again, I’m pretty sure. We’re in a parking lot. Beyond that, I’ve got nothing.

9:08 We’re outside that parking lot and this area looks familiar. The dancer passes a sign that says, in part, “Labor Commission Court House.” One of the labels says “Angel’s Flight,” as well. So let’s see if we can work with that.

We’re in luck. It looks like the parking lot is at Hill and 3rd. We follow Hill to 7th, then cross Hill and keep going northwest on 7th. I really wish the streets downtown were oriented to the cardinal directions.

The 9:28 dancers look to be someone (well, two someones) who work behind the scenes of this project. They’re carrying some kind of glowy monitor screen things and at 9:28:48-ish they turn the screens towards the camera and if I’m correct, the monitors show them showing the monitors to the camera. Actually you can see one of the guys in one of the photos on Jon Beattie’s website. And evidently they filmed this part the same day that they did 5:32 because he’s wearing the same shirt. Is the guy standing next to him in that photo the other 9:28 dancer? He might be. We pick up another guy from behind the scenes at 9:29:55 or so and another at 9:31. Meanwhile, we make a left onto Hope.

Our 9:32 dancer passes the same place where our 12:56 am dancer was. We cross Hope and then make a left so that we’re going southeast on 8th Street. They then pass a mirrored building and Beattie turns the camera so that we see the reflection of everyone in the entourage and someone guides Beattie towards the glass so that we can see the man behind the camera.

We make a right onto Grand and at the door of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising is a sculpture of an angel wearing a cat mask standing on a blue rectangle. The angel a sculpture called “Transforming Yourself into Fashion” and is by Gwynn Murrill and the blue rectangle leads into the lobby where there is a rotunda with “flying figures” on the ceiling. I haven’t had much luck finding pictures of the rotunda and from what I can find, Google Maps’s indoor photos of the building are limited to pictures of the museum in the building. The images of the main reception area are not the same place, from what I can tell.

We make a right onto Olympic Boulevard and another right onto Hope.

9:56 Now we must be at the high school that we see in the official video. I wonder what high school it is? I wonder if it’s Hollywood High for the, like, fifth time in this video. The image is flipped again, judging by the lettering on the signs. Also, it’s a different day than when they filmed 5:32 and 9:28 because we see someone who sure looks like one of our 9:28 dancers and he’s wearing a different shirt. Beattie goes backwards up a flight of stairs this time. Even knowing how large the crew on this is, I’m still impressed.

24 Hours of Happy 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Let’s give Pharrell some money. I found that he was, like, all over the soundtrack album to the movie Hidden Figures. So here you go.

7:00 Now Pharrell’s backlit in an alley. This is going nowhere very fast. Though that building with words on the side looks vaguely familiar. Is it something we’ve seen during this project or someplace I’ve been or a chain of some sort and I’ve seen it somewhere else? Or is it just one of those buildings?

7:04 A woman with a puppet is now in that alley, which is considerably better lit than it has been previously. It remains to be seen if that’s going to do us any good.

We come out onto the street and there’s a sign pointing to “Event Parking.”

A sign. Finally. It says “Twelve Street,” which is Google tells me is a women’s clothing store in downtown Los Angeles. Sorry. Which was a women’s clothing store in downtown Los Angeles.

Okay. We start out just off Pico Boulevard in between Grand and Hope. The plant from 6:56 is a tree. We walk up the alley that cuts through the middle of that block until we reach 12th Street. We come out on 12th Street and make a right, ending up at 12th and Grand. We make a left and cross Grand.

We follow Grand to Olympic and as we head southeast, it hits me that I don’t know exactly where the video to U2’s Where the Streets Have No Name was shot. Have we been there in this project? I don’t even know.

So I do some digging and find that they were at 7th and Main. We’ve been on 7th. We’ve been on Main. Have we been on that corner, specifically? I look at Google Street View and it doesn’t look familiar. But we were, in fact, there, from what I can tell, at 11:04 am.

Now I’m nervous. Was I right back when I did that entry? Crap. I’ve got to go back and check it out.

Well, I was less clear than ideal back in my 11:00 am post, but I do have the right place. The young man at 10:56 am dances right past the building where they shot the video.

7:16 Now I’m lost again. We’re probably still on Olympic but I’m just confused about the intersection. Let’s find out.

7:26 It looks likely that we’re on Olympic (we pass a sign saying Oneone77, which looks to be somewhere on Olympic) but you can’t prove it by me yet. There are, however, more Loading Zone signs, this time with cars parked in front of them.

I take it back. We’re on Olive. Let’s see . . . at 7:16, we’re on Olive and Olympic and we head northeast on Olive. OneOne77 used to be at 709 Olive, and that building is right where it should be. The corner of that building, at Olive and 7th, is the 7-11 that we pass just after the Loading Zone signs (which are there in Google Street View). Then we make a right onto 7th and another right onto Hill.

As we approach 8th Street, there’s another really beautiful building, the Garfield Building, which has, from what I can tell, sat empty for decades. It went up for sale in 2015 but there’s no indication that it’s been sold or that anyone is doing anything with the property. It looks like it’d be a steal at $15 million. Now if my dad would just win the lottery . . . .

We make a left onto 8th Street and then we cross and make a left onto Broadway (and we’ve been here before).

7:36 We may be somewhere else now. At least, I can’t see the clock in the background in Google Street View. I can see the word “Pants” across the street but cannot make out the word above it. “Silly”? “Family”?

I guess it is “Family.” “Family Pants” ought to be pretty unique. And “Family Pants” is pretty much across from where we were at 7:35:59, so we haven’t moved at all. I wonder what happened to that clock. It’s still there, it’s just harder to see from the Google Street View car’s perspective, I guess.

After crossing 3rd, we cross Broadway and keep going down 3rd.

7:56 We’re in a parking lot and I’m having deja vu. For some reason, this parking lot reminds me of something to do with Allie Brosh and someone sitting in a shopping cart. Why? Maybe it’s a movie I saw and that for some reason I was reminded of by one of Allie’s posts?

I recognize an H&R Block. Now we’re inside a supermarket and I have no idea what supermarket we’re in. Maybe it’s a Ralph’s? What are Ralph’s’s house brands? If I can identify a house brand I can find the supermarket. Huh. I didn’t know that Ralph’ses are Kroger’ses.

Are they sure this is a real supermarket? Everything looks like it’s brand-name, even the coffee filters and the freezer of paletas (which looks to be Helados Mexico (which doesn’t have an accent)).* Also, everything is zoned** perfectly, everyone in the store is wearing an “i am OTHER” t-shirt, and there are no employees in evidence.

Wait. I see a cashier and a customer in the background and there’s a bottle of bleach that isn’t Clorox or even Cloralex.

Do we ever leave this supermarket? There’s a person in a chicken suit at 8:48. We stay in this building until 8:55. When the 8:52 dancer leaves, you can see the number “2245” above the door and that’s all I needed. They were in a now-closed Super A supermarket located at 2245 Yosemite. The location is now a Sprouts. Yep. There’s the H&R Block.

That was fun. Now on to 8:56. There’s a church behind the dancer. Is it the same church we passed back when we were on Selma? It’s looking like a distinct possibility. The dancer passes a red metal fence with small plants around the base which looks like the fence at Selma & McCadden. It’s gotta be the same church. The building to the east of the church is identical.

Ack! Did the Super A/Sprouts increase the size of our polygon?

No. It didn’t. Pity.

*In Spanish, the accent goes on the last syllable unless (a) there’s an accent mark or (b) the word ends in a vowel, an “n,” or an “s.” If the word ends in a vowel, an “n,” or an “s,” unless there’s an accent mark, the accent goes on the next-to-last syllable. That means that in order to pronounce “Mexico” so that it sounds like “MEH-hee-co” in Spanish you have to put an accent on the “e.” Otherwise it’d sound like “meh-HEE-co.”

**Pulled to the front of the shelf

24 Hours of Happy: 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm

First, let’s get the money thing out of the way. Today we shall have an Amazon Link for the album for the Despicable Me soundtrack.

6:00 Now it’s brighter again. I don’t even know anymore. Pharell is dancing up the bridge with someone who, at first, looks like a Mountie but who turns out to be a famous choreographer named Fatima Robinson.*

I’m really glad that Pharrell and Robinson were dancing around actually on the bridge like this, because unless someone makes a replica somewhere someday I’ll never be able to see it up close like this again.

We continue walking around on the bridge until 6:16.

At 6:16 we go somewhere new and it looks really familiar, like someplace they’ve filmed a movie, maybe? Or someplace that I’ve pictured the action of a book taking?

Wait. We’re still by the 6th Street Bridge. I couldn’t even begin to tell you where we are in relation to the bridge; it’s too dark and the area has changed too much. Maybe by 6:20 we’ll have some clue.

Our dancer passes something that looks like maybe a small apartment building. It’s well lit and might still be there, but I’ve still got nothing.

Eventually I’m able to identify a mural that the dancers pass as being under the 6th Street Bridge, so that solves that much. Then at 6:34, the dancers dance across some train tracks. Those tracks are still there in October of 2017, putting the dancers on Mission Street. The 6:32 dancers pass a building that’s still there at 6:35.

The 6:36 dancer goes up Willow Street E. This is such a relief. At Anderson Street, we make a left and go down a block or so. Then we turn around and come back down Anderson to Willow and back to Mission. Then we make a left onto something that Google says is 6th Street. I. Don’t know. And then we come out on Anderson again. We make a right and go back under the bridge and it sure looks to me like we end at Anderson and Jesse.

6:56 It’s dark. Really dark. The dancers are being followed by a car with its headlights on, presumably so that we can see them with the backlight. There’s a plant of some sort behind a fence over there on our right and a building on our left. We emerge into the light and make a right-hand turn. Still no clue where we are. It’s kind of postapocalyptic looking. Oh, look. Civilization. There’s a street and traffic signals and an illuminated sign of some sort. As the dancers move around, there’s a building with blue words on the side. We go back into the dark alley and the 6 pm hour ends with our dancers backlit like before.

*Who choreographed the video for his song “Come Get it Bae.”


24 Hours of Happy: 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.

And, today, to give Pharrell Williams some money, we have his 2014 album G I R L. (and also some non-breaking spaces I wonder if they worked?)

3:00 pm Ah. Okay. This is the part with the choir from the video. We stay inside the church for a while, finally emerging into the afternoon sunlight at around 3:13. We head north on Marengo until 3:16.

3:16 We’re somewhere else. Again. Are we still somewhere in Pasadena? Are we back on Vermont? Dunno. It looks like a residential neighborhood with broad streets. I can see a street name. It starts with an “A.” “Algernon”? “Algonquin”? “Aloysius”? No parking. Bike route. A guy doing The Pony this time. Another illegible street name. Pine trees.*

3:20 Wow this guy’s backlit. It’s almost like one of my photos. Wait – there’s a sign. Let’s go back. It might be a hospital sign I can see “Main Entrance” and “ICC.” Another agave. There’s a big building with a tile roof in the background.

3:24. We’re not in the same place, but it sure looks like the same big building there. From this angle it looks like maybe an apartment building? Yet another illegible street name. And another – no, wait. Does that say “Mt. Pleasant”? Let’s try that out.

This could be it. We start out on Campus Road and Alumni (that’s our “A” street name) near Occidental College.** We follow the street (which is lined with pine trees and has a sign that says “ICC” on it) and just before we make a left onto Stratford, we can see a large building with a tile roof behind us. Mt. Pleasant makes a T junction with Stratford.

3:32 We’ve moved again. I think. Did we move at 3:28? No, I think that’s where we left off. We cross Avenue 49 in the right place. The background matches. The fences match. That’s the same mailbox.

That flowering shrub is the same.

So that house on the corner must have really changed.

I guess that is the same house. Amazing what a coat of paint and a deck will do.

The train of her wedding dress will be really grubby after dragging it along the street like that.

Oh! And we’ve turned onto Avenue 50 and are headed southeast. Then we make a left onto Meridian. I wonder what this bride’s story is. Is she a model or is that her wedding dress. Pharrell got married in 2013, didn’t he? Is this his wife?

No it doesn’t look like her. And that’s doesn’t look like what his wife wore at their wedding so probably not.

3:36 Rush hour must be starting or something. Those vehicles are driving right past that young woman (and, presumably, the entourage walking ahead of her). I wish I knew where in the block she was right now. ‘Cause there’s something in the middle of the sidewalk there and I wonder if it’s a permanent fixture or what. Oh, wait. We’re at the end of the block. And I don’t see anything on the sidewalk there, though it could be behind one of those cars***.

We cross Avenue 51 and I really need to go to bed. We’re hoping to go state parking tomorrow.

(the next day)

We make a left onto Avenue 52 and we might not have time to go state parking today. We both overslept.

We eventually find ourselves making another right back onto Stratford. Our next dancer is wearing high-heeled footwear of some sort (we’re still pretty backlit here, but I think they’re boots) and she looks a little unsteady on her feet, like she has either walked or danced in these heels but not both together.

3:48 We’re on a sidewalk. Are we still on Stratford? I see a steeple-looking thing there. Let’s see if I can find it on Google Street View. Yep. There it is. I wonder what it is. I know how to get back here from there.

It’s the Iglesia Adventista de Highland Park. It’s kind of a cool-looking building. Their Facebook has the name in English (Highland Park Seventh Day Adventist Church) but the information on the page is all in Spanish.

Oh, I can hear my late mom now. “She’s not dancing. She’s just posing.” We get the occasional dance step from this young lady, but overall, it feels more like she thinks she’s a model in a fashion shoot than a dancer in a music video. We continue following Stratford after it jogs slightly north at Avenue 55. How far back do these numbers go? Is there an Avenue 1 somewhere? Looking it up, the “North Avenue #” names only look to go as far back as 16.

3:52 We’re leaving Highland Park and now we’re at a cemetery? I wonder what cemetery we’re in. It’s not Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, I don’t think. Time to hit Google Image Search.

*I still don’t know where we were, months later.

**Alma mater of Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Barack Obama.

***for varying definition of “cars.”

24 Hours of Happy: 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm

2:00 to 2:25-ish I really thought that we were going to spend another hour inside Union Station. Then, around 2:25, the dancer walks out the front door of the station and . . . keeps going. We start out on Alameda and head south. We cross Alameda at Temple.

What temple is this street named for, I wonder. Oh, apparently it’s not a temple, but a Temple. Jonathan Temple, to be exact, a rancher who lived in the area and was the first mayor of Los Angeles. No relation to Shirley, I guess.

Are we going to go down Temple? It looks like it.

And we start to go northwest on Temple.

2:44 Now we have three guys . . . somewhere. You can see an underpass and a pink and gray building behind them. We passed a pink and gray building on Temple, but this one looks less pink and more gray, so I don’t think it’s the same one, but I’ve been wrong before.

Maybe this is the parking garage from 9 am? Judging by the public art piece there by the underpass, yes, it is the Grand Avenue parking garage again and we’re heading northwest on 4th Street. At the corner of 4th and Hope, we make a right onto Hope.

2:48 4th and Hope was nice while it lasted. We’re somewhere else now. I see a sort of plaza with trees. I see buildings. I see a bicycle lane. I see Pharrell in Union Station (I goofed and restarted the video instead of pausing). There’s a bus shelter and a blue-and-white sign not entirely unlike the sign for Good Samaritan Hospital. Are we back over on that side of town?

Ah-ha! The words “Federal Building.” That should help us narrow it down. Are we back on Temple, maybe? A lot of the governmental buildings are out there.

We’re now on Los Angeles Street again, this time between Temple and Aliso. The blue sign is for the Los Angeles Mall. We cross Aliso and then go over the 101. Well, the dancers do. I somehow click in the wrong place on the Street View and end up on the 101.

Okay, I’m back on Los Angeles.

We continue north and pass a lady with a doggo. The dancer stops to pet the pupper and we see a man arrive with two more dogs in a stroller. There’s a lot of greenery nearby, so I wonder if there’s a dog park near where we are. So I look it up and we’re near Father Serra Park, which doesn’t seem to have a dog park.

In fact, Los Angeles has only nine dog parks that I can find. San Antonio currently has 11 dog parks. That’s one dog park per 441,000 Angelenos and one dog park per 136,000 San Antonians. Los Angeles had better get on the ball.

We cross Los Angeles and guess what we see in the background? If you didn’t guess Union Station, you’d better keep guessing until you do. Because that looks to be where we’re headed. Union Station is sure a pretty building and is framed very attractively at around 2:55:45 or so. I just kind of wish we’d spend some time somewhere else. Particularly since we’re burning daylight here.

I missed a day during the 2-2:59 hour because I had some kind of digestive thing. It may have been my motion sickness cropping up, it may have been something I ate, it may have been an eight-hour bug. But either way, watching Beattie look up into the sky after each dancer and then back down at the next one was making my nausea worse.

2:56 Where are we going to start the 3:00 pm hour? There’s a sign for California State Route 110 and the building there on the right sure looks familiar. Have I seen it in real life or in this video or does it just have one of those facades?

More building and our dancer (a) is being photographed from an awkward angle or (b) has a little bit of a limp.

Okay, we’ve left Los Angeles proper now, I guess. The building is the First Baptist Church of Pasadena. And it looks like the Google Street View car went through this area at night during a blackout. Never mind. I was in Pasadena Texas and not Pasadena California. That would explain the darkness (if the car did go through that area at night). There aren’t a lot of streetlights out that way, I guess.

So we start out on Marengo in Pasadena and make a left onto Holly. I wonder what that building behind the dancer is. Google Street View isn’t helping (though there must be a field trip to whatever this building is, since there’s a school bus parked outside), so we’ll use Google-Not-Street-View. According to the old school two-dimensional map, the building is the Pasadena City Hall. Also, according to the map, we’re just a stone’s throw from the Colorado Blvd. Bridge.

Looks like we’re going into the church now. I wonder why Pharrell is indoors for so many of his top-of-the-hour segments.

24 Hours of Happy: 1:00 to 1:56 pm

First, let’s try to give Pharrell some money. I can’t remember if I’ve posted a link to his previous book, but here’s the sequel: Pharrell: A Fish Doesn’t Know It’s Wet.

Today in grousing about WordPress 5.0, when I copied-and-pasted this blog post from the original document, I lost random spaces somehow. I did not have this problem in WordPress-whatever-comes-before-5.0.

1:00 So are we going to start out in the same gym? Let’s find out.

Yes, we are. And Pharrell makes a bit of a show of flinching away from the boxers practicing around him. Our 12:56 dancer is exercising in the background for most of the four minutes that Pharrell is in the gym.

1:04 Looks like I’m going to be able to phone this one in. We start out on 4th Street and go right back into the gym.

1:16 Never mind. We’re outside now and it looks like we’ll stay that way for awhile. Will we explore the neighborhood? Stay tuned and we’ll find out. So far, so good. We go west-ish on 4th Street to Omar and then make a right. Google Street View has a tent village (like a tent city but smaller) there on the corner. It might not’ve been there in 2013 though. I wonder how many of these tents are the same people? They seem to move around. The tents that you can see from 4th in October of 2017 are different from those you can see from Omar in January of 2017.

Okay, so at Boyd and Omar we cross Omar and head up Boyd. Along the way, we pass some signs saying that this is a sightseeing bus zone. What sightseers would be in this area?*

We cross San Pedro at Boyd and we’ve been here before. I went back and checked. We were here at around 11:20 am.

We cross Wall Street and this, I think, is a new-to-us area.

1:28 We skip ahead almost a block to the corner of Boyd and Los Angeles and start to head southwest. Our dancer jumps up and touches a Minion pinata as he walks along, and on Google Street View, there’s still a Minion pinata hanging in that spot in January of 2017. I guess that this video has been good for business for that store. We cross 4thStreet and then Winston and make a left onto Winston. We also pass more of those Loading Only signs. I was beginning to wonder if they were put there by the crew for the video, but you can see at least one in the Google Street View in 2017.

At the corner of Winston and IDEK-At-This-Point**, we cross Winston and pass another Loading Only sign. I’m pretty sure we’re on Wall Street.What I can see of the background looks like the Anne Douglas Center for Women. How much does a pay phone call cost these days? It looks like it was still 25¢ in 2013.

At Probably-Wall and Most-Likely-4th we make a left. As Happy goes into its I-think-”breakdown”-is-the-correct-term, our dancer clutches at her chest like she’s suffering heartbreak or an asthma attack. I’m pretty sure that I’m in the right place. The doorway of (what is in 2017) L.T. Gifts is in the right place. I’m so glad I’m doing this project only five-ish years after the video was made. In a few more years, God only knows whether I’d be able to find enough landmarks to identify where we are.

We turn into another alley (how many alleys is this now?), only it turns out that this alley is a shopping area of some sort. We emerge from the alley onto Winston, I think. Then, just before we get to Los Angeles, we turn into another alley. If I’m right about where we are,we’re going to come out on 4th Street. Let’s watch.

Actually we don’t end up on 4th. There’s another alley within that alley and we make another right down there. As of 1:45, we’re inside a building. I’m so confused. I hope we come out onto Wall Street or I’m going to have to go back and figure this all out again. Please don’t make me have to go back and figure this all out again.

We make a left onto whatever street we’re on.

Yes! We’re on Wall Street. I can see Cap Star*** behind the dancer, and Cap Star is on Wall Street. We make a right onto 4thStreet.

1:48 These three young men are celebrities of some sort. Their names,Tyler the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt and Jasper Dolphin, mean nothing to me. They are, from what I can tell from Wikipedia, members of a group called Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. I hope you can hear the dubious tone of my typing. And I also hope you kids get off of my lawn.

We seem to still be where we left off on what is likely to be 4th Street and I’ve been reading entirely too much Breaking Cat News, because for a brief moment, I think that the cat on the middle young man’s shirt is Sophie.

We are on 4th Street, but I was going the wrong direction. I thought we were going northwest, but we were going southeast. We should be passing the LA Sands gym soon, right? Or am I hopelessly lost?

We cross San Pedro and keep going down 4th Street.

1:52 More Pony.

1:53:37 We’re crossing Crocker Street, which does, in fact, put us a block northwest of the LA Sands gym. Will we make it all the way back in the next two and a half minutes?

1:55:30 If my calculations are correct, that should be the corner of 4thand Towne and the LA Sands gym should be right across the street. I’m doing that moving back and forth changes the scene thing again.Nothing as dramatic as the destruction of the 6th Street bridge, but boy, does this corner change between January and October of 2017.

Three of these four corner buildings must have been bought by the same people in those ten months, because they’re all the same shade of blue in October. Well, either that or a very persuasive blue paint salesman came through in that time, I guess.

And now, 1:56.

Oh, goody. We start out indoors. I hope we get some kind of hint where we are at some point in the 1:56 to 2:55:59 hour. Otherwise this will be another hour that I skip.

I stand corrected. We’re in a courtyard of some sort. The things that I assumed were pillars are about half pillars and about half palm tree trunks.

1:56:50 And now we’re indoors. Dammit. A sign says something about Metrolink trains as we go down an escalator, so maybe we’re going into the subway?

We are in the subway. I don’t know what station we’re at, but I can see that both the red and purple lines go there, so that looks like Union Station, the Civic Center, Pershing Square, 7thStreet/Metro Center, Westlake/MacArthur Park, or Wilshire/Vermont. I see people in USC shirts. We haven’t been to that part of the city yet. And the winner is Union Station. I can see the words “Union Station East Portal” above the entrance to the train platforms.

Some people step off to one side to stay out of the shot, but I guess they figure out that they’re in the shot because they keep walking after a moment.

*I did some digging later and this is just around the corner from the Little Tokyo Historic District. So those tourists, I would imagine.

**We’re way too close to the dancer. She’s very pretty and is wearing a very brief top, but some of us are here for the other scenery.

***A store that sells baseball caps. Not the flea medication.

24 Hours of Happy Project: 11:00 to 11:56

I completely forgot our “Let’s Give Pharrell Williams Some Money” links in the last couple of posts. I’m going to link to a Colombian artist by the name of J Balvin this time. I’ve mentined the song Safari which was produced by (and features the singing voice of) Pharrell. I also like the song Ginza from that album and Sigo Extrañandote is a great song, but the video is really heartbreaking. So here’s the album: Energía.

================

11:00 There’s something big there in the background. At first I thought it was a giant statue of maybe an owl? But maybe it’s just a tree. Pharrell lies down on the trunk of a car and I hope that we know whose car that is. People are gathering to watch the filming and he high-fives someone through a chain-link fence. Some guy is filming this on his phone. If he would upload it and it had a location tag that would make my life so much easier. There’s a fence with some plants behind it that for some reason reminds me of the museum at the La Brea Tar Pits.

11:04 Now we’re back out on the street where we started out. We make a left at a help wanted sign. We pass something that looks like a fabric store. We’ve passed one thing that might be a tailor shop and one thing that probably is a fabric store. Where is the fashion district for Los Angeles? There’s a Maple Street in the fashion district. “Maple” is short and starts with an “M.” I see the words “City Discount.” What do you want to bet that it’s a chain with stores on every corner in the city?

There’s just the one. And it’s a block off Maple. It’s not quite in the fashion district, though. We’re now at the corner of 6th and Los Angeles. Before that we came down Los Angeles and before that we were on 7th. So now I’ve tracked us back to the beginning and the street isn’t Maple; it’s Main. We start on Main and 7th, head down 7th to Los Angeles, and take Los Angeles to 6th.

11:12 We aren’t where we left off. I think we’re back, oh, at 7th and Los Angeles, maybe? Okay, so this is funny. I was going to check to make sure that I’m right about where we are and rather than opening a new window, I reused an already-open one. It just so happened that it’s the page where I searched for GEANCO based on the Facebook ad for a campaign where they’re sending someone to tea and a movie premiere with Benedict Cumberbatch. I sort of figured that the campaign was going to send someone to maybe London or something and so after I clicked on it, I thought that this was going to screw me up completely. Turns out that GEANCO (and the prize in the contest) are for Los Angeles, and that GEANCO’s headquarters is at 4th and Olive, which isn’t that far from where I actually wanted to be. Someday, after I’ve finished this project and can reboot my computer, I’ll plot a route and find out how far exactly. I’m betting it’s less than a mile. And I’m right. We are at 7th and Los Angeles (btw, according to the map I just pulled up, the video for U2’s Where the Streets Have No Name was shot at 7th and Main, a block northwest from where the dancer is at this point in the video).*

11:16. Great. The image is mirrored again for some reason. I’ve got “Vitamins.” I’ve got “Hotel” I’ve got “One Way.” I’ve got “ATM Perfume.” Ooh! I know where we are. When we were on Los Angeles before, there was a big white building with a red fire escape in the background. That’s the hotel. At least, I think it is. Never mind. It’s a different building. Dammit. I’ve got “Jewelry Watches Buckles.” I’ve got parts of phone numbers the words “oil burner.”

11:20 Kid with wild hair and it looks like we’re dancing back the way we came and things are no longer reversed. Yep “Oil Burner” is now on the other side of the street. And now we have “Ray Ban” and “le Center.” “Wholesale Center”?

11:24 Things are reversed again. I looked up “Wholesale Center” and the first result, which is listed under ‘”HK Wholesale Center” but the building says “Hong Kong Wholesale Center” looks like a distinct possibility.

So here goes. At 11:16, we’re at the corner of 5th and Los Angeles. We go northeast to the corner of Los Angeles and Winston. We cross Winston and head Southeast. At 11:20, we are just a smidge farther southeast on Winston and head northwest. We make a right onto Los Angeles. At Los Angeles and 4th, we head southeast on 4th. At the corner of 4th and Wall, we’re still flipped. We cross Wall and make a . . . left? No, a right. No, I was right the first time. It’s a left. So now we’re going northeast on Wall. We cross Boyd and make a right so that we’re going southeast on Boyd.

And then I lost the polygon. I got an error saying to reload the page and when I did, poof. So, I’ll see if I can possibly find a way to recreate it and save it. Maybe with directions? 7th and the LA River to the corner of San Fernando and Glendale almost up to the Colorado Street exit of the 5 or something like that? I’ll have to play around with it.

Anyway, we take Boyd to San Pedro (the street, not the suburb) and make a left then take San Pedro to 3rd and make another right. This dancer kind of reminds me of Michele Greene, who played Abby on LA Law.

11:36 We’re somewhere else now. Will Olivia be able to figure out where we are? Let’s watch.

11:40 No. No she cannot. We look to still be in the same place, so let’s give me another four minutes to figure this out.

11:44 Wow. This location is tough. I only have 12 more minutes to figure this out. There’s a big building that looks like a church or a museum in the background. That should help me figure it right out. Now we’ve gotten to a place where there are more people and another church or something w-a-a-y back there. I’ve seen the word “Hollywood” twice, so that’s a pretty good clue there. One of the “Hollywood”s is followed by the word “Refresh”? So let’s see what Google gives us. Wait. No, it’s “Hollywood Refreshed.” I just noticed the stars. So we’re back on Hollywood Boulevard, probably.

Okay, so let’s try this on for size. Starting on Hawthorne just behind Hollywood High School then down to Sycamore and Sycamore to Hollywood Boulevard and make a right. Looks good to me.

11:48 We start about a block away from where we left off, across the street from the Hard Rock Cafe, with Jimmy Kimmel. We go up the stairs and into the building where his show is filmed, apparently. And in an interesting choice, Kimmel decides not to sing along with Pharrell, but to sing along with the backing vocals. We follow Kimmel though the theater to his set and he really looks happy. So many celebrities aren’t, you know. I really believe the studies that happiness levels off at around $75,000 of income and that beyond that you keep trying to achieve more happiness with more money and it never works.

Kimmel comes out the back door of the studio and we start following a woman going the other way. She hugs the security guard and heads into a fenced-in area (this turns out to be the parking lot for the theater). Is this Mrs. Kimmel or something? I cheated and looked at a list of dancers that I found online and it doesn’t say. She’s probably underweight in real life. I was once standing by some people talking to an actress who’s rather well-known for being big and I totally didn’t recognize her because face-to-face she looks about as heavy as my mom did and my mom was only carrying about ten to fifteen extra pounds. Ever since then, I’ve realized that it really is true, the camera does add pounds. And as such, I think that this woman must be very, very thin in real life.

11:56 We’re watching a young woman working behind the scenes somewhere. A hotel, maybe? A restaurant? My money’s on hotel because we first watch her in a room full of folded-up white fabric. Maybe the restaurant has white tablecloths and napkins, but it’s more likely that these are sheets and towels. Or maybe it is a restaurant. Or a science-fiction movie. There’s an object hanging on the wall behind her at 11:58:22 that at first I took to be an immersion blender, but then it occurred to me that I may have seen whatever it is as the weapon in an old Doctor Who episode. The Keys of Marinus, maybe? Or maybe it is an immersion blender. There looks to be something like a slicing mandoline hanging nearby.

*You can tell that I wasn’t really paying attention. We start the hour at 7th and Main, which is where the video was filmed. There’ll be more on the video later.

24 Hours of Happy Project: 8:56 to 10:56 am

9:00 We’re still in the parking garage. We emerge into the sunlight at 9:09. Now where are we? I see the letters GB in neon and the number 225. Not enough to go on. Yet. I see the words “General Thaddeus Kosciuszko,” which is the name of a street. So we’re on Olive Street right now heading southwest-ish. This couple can really dance, but I sincerely hope that those are some version of cheerleader “spankies” under her skirt. We make a left onto 4th Street. We go a block and then everything starts to look different from how it looks in Google Street View, but the view behind the dancer matches, so we’ll assume that we’re still on 4th. We cross Broadway and then make a right. I panicked for a moment when we could see a sign that said “4th Street” behind the 9:24 again, but then we passed what was a Walgreens in January of 2017 and a sign that said “5th Street” and I knew that everything was all right.

9:28 Our dancer is a woman in a motorized wheelchair or scooter of some sort. As we reach the intersection, Beattie heads a little to the south and I thought that we were going to turn. Nope. He was walking down the curb cut so that she could use it as well. That made me smile.

9:32 We are now filming a guy carrying a pizza. Is he a delivery guy? Is it his pizza? Is he doing a favor for a friend? We don’t know yet. He does make a left onto 7th, though. And he starts dancing with the pizza. I hope he’s not a delivery guy because that pizza is definitely not held level throughout. He holds the pizza out to some people he passes. Maybe he’s selling the pizza? At any rate, he puts it down and then makes a left onto Spring Street. I hope one of the crew (from what I’ve read, there are like 15 people involved at any moment) is watching the pizza. Boy, Downtown LA has big blocks.

9:36 We’re somewhere else now. Let’s find out where. We’re still on Spring Street between 6th and 7th, still going the same direction, even. But we’re on the other side of the street. We then turn right onto 7th and head northwest.

9:44 We’re just all over the place today. We have the word “Tower” and a sign that says “8th Street,” so it looks like we’re at 8th and Broadway headed northeast on Broadway. If you ever get invited to dance in a video, you can’t go wrong with The Pony. If I had more intestinal fortitude than I currently possess, I would go back and figure out exactly how many dancers are doing The Pony in this thing.

9:50 This kid is a good dancer. Also, there’s another police car.

9:52 Another small kid with better moves than I’ve ever had. Don’t know where we are yet, though. She passes a Famima!! (yes, the exclamation points are part of the name) store. I think I see the Los Angeles theater in the background, which means that we’re still on Broadway. Yeah. I think we’re between 5th and 6th on Broadway.

9:56 Let’s find out where we’re going to spend the hour between 9:56 and 10:56. I can see a sign that says Cesar E. Chavez Drive. Another sign says “Mozaic.” That ought to be enough to go on. We’re now near Union Station on Union Station Driveway, near as I can tell. And then we dance our way right into the station. Let me guess that this is where Pharrell will turn up next. I love train stations. I guess I know one place we’ll be going the next time we’re in California.

Believe it or not, Union Station is just within the boundaries of our polygon. So now our polygon is 21.64 square miles.

Also, this is when I realized that Pharrell has to be between the Alexandra Hotel and the next building over in his 1:00 am appearance. You can see the arched windows of the building at 5th and Broadway behind him.

10:00 I guess that 10:00 will have to go with 9:00. All hour, the dancers have stayed in or near Union Station. They occasionally have walked outside of Union Station, but no one has actually left the property.

10:56 Let’s see where we go next. I wish I could read the name of the street in the background there. It’s a short name and the first letter looks like maybe an “M”? There’s something that looks like a convenience store there on the right. We head down an alley and I still haven’t been able to identify anything. I can see the word “shop” one of the windows. Maybe it’s a barber shop, maybe it’s a tailor shop. I guess we’ll find out.

24 Hours of Happy Project — 6:56 to 8:56 am

I’m finally getting back to posting these and I owe it all to J. Balvin. I heard his song “Safari” (that is a YouTube link; this is the Amazon link) on the radio and the voice of the man singing “Vente conmigo. Solo conmigo” sounded so damn familiar. And it turned out to be Pharrell Williams, which reminded me why Pharrell’s voice sounds so familiar. This project.

Lots of people dancing up the river for the first hour but not many landmarks, so we’re getting two hours for the price of one here.

Next up, the rest of 6:56, followed immediately by 7:00.

7:00 We’re on the Los Angeles River now and likely to stay here for a long time. Looks like after 7:04 we start walking north along the river. At around 7:19, we pass a sign that says “Equestrians prohibited” which makes some kind of sense, since the horse chestnuts would probably be difficult for bikers to avoid. But then we pass a “horse crossing” sign and now I’m totally confused. I also don’t buy that this is 7:00 am because (a) the direction of the shadows makes me think that the sun is to the west, and not the east, and (b) cars are actually able to drive on the 5. If I recall correctly, by 7 am traffic is at a standstill on the freeways.

7:56 We move to the actual river itself, rather than the bank. It looks like the place where they filmed the race scene in Grease. And it doesn’t just look like it. This is the same place. The bridge in the background is the 7th Street Bridge in Grease, and today there’s a kind of low-lying building with lots of windows up on the bank. You can see the same building (or a substantially similar one) on Google Street View. Stretching that corner of the polygon out that far brings us to 21.58 square miles. So now we have 163 Hours of Happy.

8:00 We’re still in the LA River. This part of the river has a current. I was not expecting that. Pharrell walks down the dry edge of the river, up the berm under the next bridge, and around what looks to be some homeless person’s shopping cart. Hey, loving a city requires you to accept some of the less pleasant aspects (even if you aspire to change them). We end up in some kind of tunnel.

8:04 So this is fun. We dance through that tunnel and out onto the street. You can see that we’re near a bridge, but fuck if I can tell what bridge we’re near. Finally, after 8:08, we dance past a sign saying “590santefestudios.com” so I use that as my signpost to find our location. The closest bridge to that sign is the 4th Street bridge, but that wasn’t right. So I did some digging and found that the 6th Street bridge wasn’t demolished until 2016. So it was still there when the video was made. So I hit Google Street View, and there, in November 2015, is the bridge. And there, from under the bridge, is the building that our 8:08 dancer is passing. Then I took a step forward and the bridge and building are both gone. I couldn’t find the exact spot again, but I found one close to it and went back and forth “Now they’re here” “Now there gone” for a while. That’s always fun to do on Google Street View.

We make a left onto Willow (the building she dances past is still there in October of 2017). She covers a lot of territory in her four minutes. I didn’t expect her to get nearly as far as she did on Willow. We make a right onto Mateo and then another right onto Palmetto and a left onto Santa Fe.

8:20 We’re at a bridge again. What bridge? Dunno. Wait. We’re at the 4th Street bridge. How do I know that? Because with the disappearance of the 6th Street bridge, I was looking around the 4th Street bridge back at 8:04 and I recognize that building behind the dancer. We then follow Santa Fe Street northwards-ish to Mateo, make a right onto Mateo and then a left onto 4th Place, I think?

8:24 We skip ahead a bit to Molina Street and make a left and then a right onto Palmetto and then another right onto what I think is probably Colyton. “Colyton”? That looks like a typo, but it’s really the street name.

8:36 We return to Hollywood for the appearance of some kind of fighter or other (Youtube comments say that it’s Urijah Faber?) and a young woman who is apparently his sister. We start on Argyle Street just north of the W hotel and make a right onto Hollywood Boulevard.

8:40 I don’t know. Probably back where we were before on Colyton, I guess? No, we’re definitely somewhere else. I see the number “500” and the word “Enterprises” but unfortunately they’re on different buildings. This is no help. Oh, good. “Enterprises” is apparently 439. Wait. We are still on Colyton, only at the other end of the street. And, yep. There’s “Enterprises” on Google Street View. The other side of the sign reads “Lidderdale.” We make a left back onto Palmetto.

8:48 Now where are we? Okay. Now we’re going down Hewitt, which we skipped before for some reason. I wonder if the road was blocked off before. Huh. There’s a police car back there. I wonder if he (or she; can’t tell at this distance) has noticed our little guerrilla music video. I used to have long hair and it never swung like that. It always kind of moved in a big chunk. Does the 8:48 dancer use any kind of product to get that or is she just lucky? I go back and forth between watching her hair and watching that police car, which pulls to a stop right behind her as the song ends. I wonder if we find out what happened next? Well, I guess the police officer was just parking. We get to the intersection of Hewitt and 4th and then turn back around and head back up Hewitt. At 8:55, the 8:52 dancer goes right past that police car and we can see that it’s a sheriff’s car. For what that’s worth.

8:56 We’re somewhere else now. I see a sign that looks like it says “Music Center” with an arrow pointing left. And upon looking it up, it seems that “Music Center” is something that a sign in Los Angles might say, so we’ll go with that. Another sign that says “Grand” and Grand is a street near the Music Center, so we’re making progress. We’re shooting looking up at this dancer for some reason. I just accidentally found our location. We’re in an underground parking garage at 4th Street and Grand Avenue. I wish I could figure out why Google Street View will suddenly send me underground or beneath streets when I don’t mean it to, even if it worked out in my favor this time.

24 Hours of Happy Project: 5:00 to 5:59:59 am

Pharrell promotion time. I’ve got, like, four things that will give Pharrell money if you buy them, too, and here’s the first. Amazon Associates link this time, since I’ve spent my own money on it: the movie of Despicable Me (the soundtrack will probably be up next).

Note: I am pasting this into the interface (preparatory to scheduling it for midnight on June 11, 2018) and I still cannot swear where we are from 5:00 to 5:35:59. At first I thought it was Griffith Park, but some sites mention that the video was filmed in part at Runyon Canyon Park, but it doesn’t really look like that either, near as I can tell from Google Street View. I guess on Alex and my next trip to California I’ll make him visit Runyon Canyon Park to see if it looks familiar.

==============

5:00. Wow. I’m stumped. We spend a lot of time in a big flat area where the ground has a kind of pinkish cast, like it’s made from pink granite or something. There are towers with what I at first thought were guy wires, but upon further watching seem to be holding up power lines. But there’s not a single landmark or sign* to be seen. There’s a fence with sharp pointy bits on the top. The fence looks kind of institutional and the pointy bits are pointing outwards towards the viewer, so, I don’t know. The Los Angeles Zoo, maybe? A college or boarding school? Boy, Beattie has been walking downhill backwards for an awfully long time. I hope he’s going to be okay.

Now there’s an I don’t know, water tower? A big green tank of some sort, at any rate. What I wouldn’t give for a street sign. A subway station. A McDonald’s.

Okay, now we have a gate. Not a fancy, identifiable gate, no. Just one of those things that they padlock shut to keep you from driving up that street. It’s probably metal but looks like PVC pipe. A chain-link fence. More chain-link fence. Pine trees. Minions.

5:36 Now we’re at Magic Johnson’s house. Even if I’d been to Magic Johnson’s house, which I haven’t, or I could tell where it is, which I can’t, I wouldn’t be saying, “Hey everyone! Magic Johnson lives at . . . “

5:40 Sigh. A residential neighborhood. No way I can. Oh, wait. Is that Vermont on the way up to Griffith Park? I think it might be. Let’s check. Eee. I got it. Now how on earth did I get it? Apparently the “bumps 15 mph” sign is more memorable than one would expect. We start at Aberdeen and then make a left onto Vermont, heading south on the sidewalk along the northbound lanes. Time to enlarge the polygon. We keep walking down Vermont to Hillhurst and then down Hillhurst to Gainsborough, where we make a left.

5:56 Now we’re somewhere completely new, I think. Let’s find out. The street name behind him looks like “Tempe” or “Temple,” which is probably just my brain filling in because I know that there’s a Temple street in LA. There is something that looks like a school or a church up there on the hill behind him, but I’ve only got 40 seconds left, so I doubt I’ll ever figure this one out. The angle just changed and we seem to be at the top of a very steep hill. I wonder what I’d get if I searched for “the steepest hill in Los Angeles. . . .”

*Well, okay. There are a couple of signs, mostly what looks like of the “put your garbage here” and the “don’t climb on this tower” varieties.

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ETA: I finally found it. Well, part of it, anyhow. It sure looks to me like the 5:04 dancer passes the spot at coordinates 34.1252253,-118.2820732 in Griffith Park. The posts, the buildings, the fire hydrant, and the bollards all match pretty much exactly. Unfortunately I cannot follow the whole trail because no one has driven/walked it yet and posted it to Google Street View.

I definitely think I’m onto something here. We seem to be following Vista del Valle Drive, but I cannot figure out which direction we’re going. I’ll have to do further research.