December 2018 – Page 2 – To Hither and Yon

24 Hours of Happy: 12 noon to 12:56 pm

Let’s see. Let’s give both Pharrell and me some money today. I first became aware of Pharrell’s work through the movie Despicable Me. The commercials made it look like a boring Spy vs. Spy knockoff with Gru and Vector as the “spies.” But then I read a blurb that explained the whole plot with the girls and I thought I’d give it a try. I loved it. And I loved the music. And I bought the CD of the soundtrack (link to follow in a future post). And I saw the second movie and I loved that one, too (again, link to follow someday).

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12:00 Pharrell walks through the same back room and out into the dining room of a restaurant. And the table linens are white, so maybe there’s no hotel after all. The dining room is a very nice shade of dark green. As I tell people when we talk about the color scheme of my house, I’m not afraid of color, but maybe color should be afraid of me* (when I go back to renting an apartment once Alex is done with college, I’m going to invest in removable stick-on wallpaper for the apartment). Pharrell is at a table, sitting across from a woman in a short bob haircut and Beattie is circling the table in a way that is making me kind of dizzy. I may have to stop here for the night.

12:00 (continued) Pharrell and the woman are going to leave the restaurant and we’ll see where they are. No such luck. They are just lip-syncing and dancing around in the restaurant. The woman is probably someone famous, but she kind of reminds me of Sandra Bullock. The light is getting whiter, so they’re getting closer to the door. There’s the inspection grade. They’re out the door and now the song is over.

12:04 We’re outside now. Are we still in the same place? I see a bit of painted wood that looks to be the same color as the doorjamb that Pharrell and the woman passed, so I certainly hope so. And now, just before I go to work and will have to finish this later, I get the impression that this next dancer actually kind of looks like my friend Jim. It’d be funny if it was, but I’ll have to wait until 10:00 tonight to find out.

It’s 10:44 pm and I’m just getting back to this. On the other hand, I’ve earned $1.81 for my foreign language project and I’m now a day ahead on my pedometer steps. Okay, so I can see a liquor store and there’s, like, the third or fourth loading zone sign that I’ve seen in this project. Someone must’ve been selling those things door-to-door. Alex agrees that this guy looks kind of like Jim.

It looks like maybe a hospital across the street there? We turn right and pass a multi-level parking garage. There are high-rise buildings in the distance but I can’t identify any of them.

12:08 A black lady with a white mohawk is up next and there are agaves near the parking garage. The agaves look very nice, but they don’t help me figure out where we are. Palm trees, bougainvillea. Ah-ha! Something I can read! “Good Samaritan Hospital and Medical Office Building.” I can work with that. Hopefully.

So, looks like the restaurant is “Pacific Dining Car” and we start out at 6^th and Witmer. The agaves are gone now and there’s a small palm tree in their place. The palm trees and bougainvillea are gone, too. At Witmer & Shatto, we cross Shatto and continue down to Wilshire and then make a left onto Wilshire.

My computer is so slow right now. I’m going to close everything and reboot so that hopefully things will be less frustrating tomorrow morning.

Never mind. I missed a turn. We start at 6^th and Witmer, then make a right turn at Witmer & Shatto and go down to Shatto & Valencia. Then we make a left, cross Shatto and go down to Valencia & Wilshire.

So the agaves are still gone but the palm trees are not. The jury’s still out on whether the bougainvillea are there or not. I can’t see their flowers on the Google Street View.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but the 12:12 dancer got almost to the end of the block and then turned around and headed back the way he came. Well, Wilshire was nice while it lasted, I guess.

12:16 We’re still on Wilshire and this time we cross Valencia and keep going. How far down are the La Brea Tar Pits anyhow?

5.6 miles. I don’t think we’re going to get that far out on Wilshire. It’s the right direction, though, so that’s something.

We cross Union Avenue and Google Street View’s version of Wilshire heads off into a parking lot. It’s very strange. In the process of reporting this to Google and trying to remember exactly where the street goes off the proverbial rails, I realize how close we are to MacArthur Park (which may or may not be melting in the dark). Will we make it that far? Will we see the homeless camps that are there now? Were the homeless camps there in 2013? I almost can’t wait to find out. It will, however, have to wait for Donna Summer to finish singing.

12:24 Okay, maybe we won’t get to MacArthur Park. I . . . don’t know where we are. I suppose it’s too much to hope that we’re just seeing the same place from a different angle. I think we’re back in Hollywood. I can see that the street they’re crossing is Sunset Boulevard. And no Norma Desmond in sight. I think that’s a school behind them. Is that Hollywood High School, again? Yes, yes it is. The good news is that we seem to be going south on Highland, so we’ll be venturing into new-to-us territory. We definitely are going south. I’m recognizing the buildings. These guys made good time. They’re probably at DeLongpre? Yes, definitely DeLongpre. I can see the Firestone store behind the 12:28 dancer. Who is definitely a dancer. I’ve never seen such a small child do such a high kick before. I’m pretty sure my eyes bugged out of my head when I saw that.

I really hope that this little girl wants to be dancing like this. If in the 20-year “24 Hours of Happy: Where Are They Now?” retrospective, she says that she didn’t want to dance at all and her mom (or her dad) forced her, I’ll be very disappointed. Particularly since I wanted to dance like that when I was that age.**

We cross Fountain Avenue (is this the same Fountain that the bikers passed 12 hours/a week or so ago?) Actually it kind of is. It’s interrupted by Joseph LeConte Middle School, but the two ends definitely do line up). Hey! This dancer isn’t doing The Pony. Is that a cha-cha-cha, maybe? Dunno.

12:36-ish. There’s The Pony.

12:40 We aren’t moving. I think we’re waiting for the light to change. Yep.

There’s a big building of some sort coming up according to Google Street View. I wonder if we’re going to actually visit it. We pass it around 12:43 but there’s no indication what it is. So I guess I’m going to have to do some Googling.

The building in question is the Hollywood Storage Building, which makes it sound like it’s for storing one’s Hollywoods. According to one article on Curbed.com, it was also a speakeasy during prohibition. We end in that block, in between Santa Monica and Romaine Street.

12:44 This looks kind of familiar. Is it somewhere I’ve been physically, somewhere we’ve seen in this project, or is it just one of those things?

Wait. Never mind. We’re on Romaine Street. Our new dancer starts out apparently inside Anawalt Lumber Company and then comes outside and makes an almost immediate right onto Romaine. Have we seen Romaine Street yet?

I’m wondering if this is one of those times when they had to reroute because of construction or something. Maybe something was going on on Wilshire that made it difficult to film there on these days?

Now we’re jaywalking across Romaine. I wonder where we’re going? Most of these buildings are gone now, so I wonder where we are.

Ah. We evidently want to stop before we get all the way down to La Brea, so we’re going to cross the street and turn around here.

I hate it when I look down and miss a turn. Turns out that at the corner of Romaine and Orange we make a right, so everything from there on is on Orange. I usually catch the turns I’ve missed because the buildings and background don’t match, but there’s a big construction site on Romaine and Orange that goes all the way to Romaine and Sycamore and I figured that they’d razed a lot of buildings to create that.

While looking for where I got lost, I found an interesting building, though, at 7000 Romaine. I figured that it’d turn out to be another glorified storage shed, but instead it turns out to be the building that had, at one time, been the headquarters of Howard Hughes’s empire.

We turn around just short of Santa Monica and head back up watching a guy who is working very hard at learning how to do tricks on his skateboard, but hasn’t quite gotten it yet. Then we turn right back onto Romaine and now we’re going past the building that’s no longer there. We turn right once again onto Sycamore as the song ends and we go to our opening location for the 12:56 to 1:55:59 hour.

12:56 We’re outdoors with a good-looking possibly-Latino guy (I say “possibly” because I get stopped all the time by people who think I’m a Latina based on my coloration and there’s basically no way for me to be anything but European, unless some random person from Asia or Africa wandered into Czechia, Germany, Lithuania/Latvia (depending on the generation), or Scotland at some point in history)***. He’s in good shape and dances really well, though probably the judges would knock off a few points for a few instances of the White Man’s Overbite.

Before I can get any kind of handle on where we are, we go into a gym. I pretty much give it up for lost, but then I see the sign saying “LA Sands Boxing Club.” Yelp and Google Maps both say that the gym is closed, but the website is still going. Looking at the building on Google Street View, it definitely looks closed now. But since we’re talking about 2013 here, let’s see if we can find where we actually are.

After digging around (and checking their previous location at 1515 Compton), it looks like we start in the mid to high 300s on Crocker Street. The dancer dances around the gym and then we watch him exercise for a while. I wonder I they went into the gym and asked for volunteers, because this guy definitely seems comfortable around the equipment.

*My bedroom is Valspar Peach Frenzy and the closest I can find to the color of my entryway is Better Homes and Gardens Stiffkey Blue (and I can’t find any image of that color that isn’t on Pinterest).

**When I did my last couple of years of college, turns out I needed just a couple more hours of physical education so I finally got to take ballet for the first time ever. I was the only ballet virgin (?) in the class, IIRC, and the teacher had us do the first exercise and then went around the room asking pretty much everyone else how much ballet they’d had. She then explained that she graded on improvement, so those who’d had ballet before would be held to a pretty high standard. I got an A in that class because it was really, really obvious that I’d never taken ballet and by the end of the semester I could do everything she’d taught us to do. Not well, necessarily, but competently. I’ve completely lost my turnout in the intervening (oh, dear God, has it really been that long?) 28 years.

***Since I wrote this, I’ve done the 23 and Me DNA thing which says that I’m 100% European, though the rumor is that my dad’s mom had some Rom heritage, if that’s true it must be far enough back that it didn’t show up in my DNA.

San Antonio Parks: Cathedral Rock Nature Park

Okay, so you turn off of Grissom Road into the little parking lot at Cathedral Rock and see a little play area and a little picnic pavilion.

Cathedral Rock Playground, 2018 — The playground at Cathedral Rock taken from a creative angle again because I didn’t want to risk getting any of the kids playing nearby in the picture

You walk a little farther and find this:

Cathedral Rock Park path — A path at Cathedral Rock Park.

And then a little farther on you find this:

Cathedral Rock Park Map — A map of Cathedral Rock Park

And you realize that there’s quite a lot of park to explore here. I focused on the corner of the map for the picture above because Cathedral Rock Park is also a trailhead for the Leon Creek Greenway and the Greenway takes up most of the map.

I took a lot of pictures here and don’t know how many I’ll use. I think there are actually more paths at Cathedral Rock than are pictured on that map, because I was following the map on Pokémon Go rather than using that map and almost all of the paths that they had on the game were there in the park (the only exception I can think of is I think it might be that loop there in the upper-left-hand corner looks like it comes straight back from the lower-left part and rejoins the main path in kind of a reverse D-shape rather than that lasso kind of shape it has on this map).

Most of the paths have the San Antonio trail levels assigned to them, where Level 1 and 2 are usable by people in wheelchairs and Level 3 is usable by really incredibly fit people in wheelchairs and Level 4 is probably not usable by people in wheelchairs. Some of the signs showing which level applies to which paths were in pretty bad shape when I was there and could use some replacement signs.

Finally, why Cathedral Rock? Beats me. The park itself is mostly level with the occasional scattered bits of limestone. Once you get to the greenway, though, you find this:

Which is way more impressive than it looks in the photo. Maybe if the deer had stood there while I took my picture rather than freaking out and running away it’d look less uninspiring.

Now I guess it’s time for a gratuitous Amazon link. I looked at books about limestone, since the rocks of what I assume is Cathedral Rock are limestone, but, eh. So I went back to the same link as I used before and dug up Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail: Washington: Section Hiking from the Columbia River to Manning Park by Tami Asars. I’m not planning on going on the Pacific Crest Trail anytime soon, but the picture on the front sure is pretty and it has 4.9 stars (out of 5) so why not?

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.

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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 6^th and Los Angeles. Before that we came down Los Angeles and before that we were on 7^th. So now I’ve tracked us back to the beginning and the street isn’t Maple; it’s Main. We start on Main and 7^th, head down 7^th to Los Angeles, and take Los Angeles to 6^th.

11:12 We aren’t where we left off. I think we’re back, oh, at 7^th 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 4^th 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 7^th 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 7^th 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 5^th 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 4^th, we head southeast on 4^th. At the corner of 4^th 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? 7^th 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 3^rd 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 7^th and Main, which is where the video was filmed. There’ll be more on the video later.