Los Angeles is an iconic city, but it never quite feels like it lives up to any sense of beautiful grandeur, the architecture is more post-modern than historic, the sun bleaches so many of its surfaces that there is always a sense that it has been washed out, and the sprawl makes it hard to contextualise your location. But despite this, there is an undeniable quality to the various haunts, whether it is the air of Hollywood Boulevard, the familiar locations from film and television, or the eccentricities of Venice Beach. The wide streets and the open expanse above give it feeling not dissimilar from post-quake Ōtautahi, although on a completely different scale. So when we were recently in the city, there was an unsettling melange of familiarity, strangeness, expectation and reality. But, for all that, there were lots of artistic treats to discover, from large murals to smaller interventions, with some big names thrown in the mix. It is impossible to cover all of such a sprawling city, and even the places we did explore are often hard to fully navigate, but here are some favourites we did find. Dive on in and check out some of our highlights from the City of Angels…
