I’m paralyzed by indecision here. I’ve decided to link to Kelis’s song Milkshake for my Pharrell promotion this time out, but there are just too many versions of it. Ack!
Okay, so I’m just going to link to the first two that come up. Looks like one is the “explicit” version and the other is the “clean” version. Milkshake by Kelis/Milkshake [Clean] by Kelis.
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4:00 Pharrell takes over from where the off-brand Lalla Ward left off on Vermont and the 101.
4:04 We’re somewhere else now. Phone calls are 25¢. There’s a gas station. There’s an escalator. So we’re headed into the subway? That could be cool. Also, Jon Beattie definitely gets the MVP award for heading backwards down an escalator like this. I hope Pharrell gave him a raise. And, well, we actually aren’t anywhere new. We kept going south on Vermont and are now at the intersection of Vermont and Beverly.
4:08 Now I’m pretty sure we’re up at Vermont and Oakwood, at the Shell station (we sure seem to spend a lot of time at gas stations).
4:12 And now we’re even farther north, this time back on the bridge over the 101. Each dancer here is heading south, by the way. Our polygon isn’t getting any bigger here, people.
4:16 We’re in a car now. I can identify neither the car nor the location. We go past a car wash and under an overpass. Wait. There’s a Chevron station and a Quality Inn. More overpasses. A Valero, I think? Another overpass and the words “Tom’s Burgers.” Now I’ve got a 7-11. OMG. I’m sure that if I could find a Chevron, a Quality Inn, a Valero, a Tom’s burgers and a 7-11 in that order, I’d have the place, but what are the odds? Okay, we have an identifiable business, finally. Violet Olga Salon. That puts us on Glendale Blvd and the location of the 7-11 means that we’re going north. And it only took 14 minutes to figure this out.
I take it back. We just turned onto Glendale. Prior to that we were on Silver Lake Blvd. The thing that says “Tom’s Burger” in the video says something about 100 years of Armenian Genocide in September of 2017. The Valero might be a Mobil now?
So now we’re on Glendale and we make a right onto Fletcher and then another right onto Riverside. And now we’re enlarging the polygon. We make a left onto Newell and then another left onto Ripple. We turn left onto Rosanna and go under the Glendale Freeway, which apparently will lead us back to Ripple? Then a left onto Gilroy (this one took me a long time because my brain kept seeing the design on the van as being public art on a cement wall. Once I figured out what it was, I saw a similar van at that turn on Google Street View and knew that had to be the right corner). Then we go under the Golden State Freeway and make a right onto Riverside again. Now I’m really confused because we turn right onto Fletcher, which means that we’re now where we were at the beginning of the paragraph. We then head back under the Golden State Freeway and the past the site where Rattlesnake Park is now, and then over the LA River. You can barely see the river, since it’s now 4:41 in the morning. Then we turn left onto San Fernando and head north (doesn’t this sound familiar? Let me guess. We’re going to make a left onto Glendale in a minute).
4:44 That’ll show me for making assumptions. We’re back on foot, with a dancer in a longish skirt and a sparkly blouse in the middle of the street . . . somewhere. Are we in a park? A wealthy-enough residential neighborhood that the houses are set really far back from the street? There’s a park-looking garbage can in the middle of a line of those little wooden bollard-type things that mark the sides of roads in parks. Like these. At 4:54 or so, we go around the other side of her so that she’s no longer backlit and can see the lights of the city in the distance, so my guess is that we’re in Griffith Park.* About damn time, if you ask me. I hesitate to enlarge the polygon unless I’m absolutely certain, which I probably won’t be until it gets lighter. Well, as of 4:59, it’s almost light enough to see, but there’s still not enough to go by to enlarge the polygon. You can see a transmission tower and guy wires behind the final dancer so maybe we’re up by the Hollywood sign?
At 4:59:59 our polygon is 13.76 square miles, meaning that we’d now need 182 Hours of Happy to cover the entire city.
*I think I’m wrong about this. Several months later I’m still pondering. In articles about the video I see more mentions of Runyon Canyon Park than of Griffith Park, but I have seen both mentioned. It may be that the next hour, much of which is spent in a park, is spent partly in each of the two.