A Kiwi looking for a signal in the noise of LA

Saturday, 14 February 2026

Mike ”MOD” O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and investor. He is currently New Zealand Trade and Enterprise’s regional director for North America but these are his own views.

OPINION: I Love LA, that iconic, slightly smug 80s banger. I’m in the car again, radio on, easing onto another on-ramp, when the brass section kicks in and Randy Newman sounds like he’s grinning through the speakers in my old 560: “We love LA, we love it!”

From the driver’s seat, it feels like a promise. Or maybe a dare, another piece of noise in a city where finding the signal takes time.

I’ve come at Los Angeles from the outside, from Aotearoa, and like most newcomers I arrived assuming it was a single place. A city. Palm trees, sunshine, confidence, delivered at scale.

That illusion doesn’t last long. Six months into a three-year adventure, I’m starting to understand the City of Angels a little more.

What we casually call LA turns out to be Los Angeles County, just under 10 million people spread across 88 incorporated cities. The biggest is Los Angeles itself, with close to 4m residents. The smallest is Vernon, with a population that barely clears a couple of hundred. Between those two extremes sits an entire civilisation.

For context, that’s roughly twice New Zealand’s population, layered into one continuous sprawl. With another 6 million barely outside.

Back home, even when we talk about diversity, New Zealand feels coherent. Our towns rhyme. The same cafés, the same real-estate offices, the same cabinet food in slightly different fonts. Cheese rolls in Gore and smashed avo in Devonport. A pie warmer, a Lotto sign, a calm sort of sameness in jandals. We smooth difference until it’s manageable.

Los Angeles does the opposite. It sharpens it.

I start to realise that the way in isn’t through landmarks or master plans, but through signage, the blunt, accidental poetry of business directories and roadside billboards. The billboards aren’t just advertising. They’re autobiography.

In Inglewood, I clock ticket scalpers, instant oil changes, just-in-time tax consultants. Everything speaks of urgency. Events, money, movement. Threaded between it all are tents tucked under overpasses, reminders that opportunity and precarity sit uncomfortably close together here.

The visibility is confronting. In New Zealand, hardship tends to be quieter, easier to avert your eyes from.

In Torrance, the tone shifts. Liquor stores in formation. Thai massage. Chinese laundries. Quietly industrious, unapologetically functional. In New Zealand we’d label this “diverse”. Here, it’s just the operating system. The footpaths are tidier, but the same quiet encampments appear at the margins.

Driving through Venice feels like slipping sideways into a parallel economy. Body composition analysis. Medicinal hooter. Psychics. Mushroom coffee elixirs. At home, alternative wellness exists, but it’s softened by humour. In Venice, belief is worn openly and priced accordingly, sometimes with someone sleeping in the doorway beneath the sign.

At this point I think I’m beginning to grasp the pattern, until another neighbourhood rewrites it.

A few miles north, Santa Monica is busy perfecting itself. Teeth whitening. Injectable cosmetics. Mani-pedis everywhere. In New Zealand we pretend not to care about vanity. In Santa Monica, self-improvement is like civic infrastructure.

In Burbank, I spot Mexican barbers, bail bondsmen, all-you-can-eat breakfasts. There’s a pragmatism here that would fit right into a provincial Kiwi town, except it sits right next to the fantasy factory of Hollywood. In Aotearoa, those worlds rarely collide. In LA, they coexist on the same block.

The longer I drive, the clearer it becomes. This fractured geography doesn’t just produce signage. It produces culture.

Los Angeles doesn’t funnel talent into a single sound. It splinters it, localises it, and then sends it global for a tidy profit.

Out of Highland Park came Billie Eilish, whisper-quiet and genre-bending, sounding nothing like the LA pop that came before her. From Compton emerged Kendrick Lamar, turning a specific place and pressure into work so sharp it won a Pulitzer. Dr Dre helped invent a West Coast sound that redefined hip-hop entirely, not by smoothing difference, but by amplifying it through headphones.

From Venice Beach came the Doors, channelling drugs, poetry and menace into something that could only have grown out of that stretch of sand, Ray Manzarek’s unhinged organ bouncing off empty rooms.

Red Hot Chili Peppers spent decades name-checking the city like a love letter written in sweat and blood. And Beck, lo-fi and ironic, feels like LA itself in musical form. A collage rather than a cathedral.

That’s the difference, I think, as I sit in traffic yet again, a freeway exit away from another entirely different city.

New Zealand decompresses. Los Angeles explodes.

We aim for compatibility. LA tolerates contradiction. It breaks itself into dozens of micro-cities, lets each pursue its own economic logic, belief system and sound, then bolts the whole thing together with freeways, inequality, and an unfathomable optimism that refuses to quit.

I stop trying to “get” Los Angeles as a whole. That turns out to be a rookie error. Instead, I read it the way it presents itself, city by city, sign by sign, song by song. It doesn’t give me understanding. But it does give me bearings.

And then, just as I think I’m getting close, the song comes back on. Newman again, sounding less like a boast now and more like instructions:

“Look at that mountain, look at those trees.”

So I do. And I also look at the tents, the traffic, the ambition, the exhaustion, the beauty and the mess, all sharing the same strip of concrete.

The freeway curves, the horns swell, and I Love LA closes the loop, reminding me that Los Angeles isn’t meant to be solved, admired from a distance, or made tidy for outsiders.

It’s meant to be lived with. And driven through. And argued with.

And if you’re honest about it, occasionally loved, not because the signal makes sense, but because it refuses to.