Sara Catania

Running Uphill

Sara Catania
Photos by Debra Dipaolo Dave Freeman stands in the rain, holding a plastic grocery bag and looking a little lost. It’s a Wednesday morning at the Santa Monica Farmers Market, but he has no interest in organic produce or fresh flowers; it’s the shoppers he’s after. He spots a potential......

Playing to Bigots

Sara Catania
In a telling example of its rightward march, the Daily News on Tuesday became the first and only major California daily to come out in support of Proposition 22. Maybe the endorsement of state Senator Pete Knight’s gay-bashing ballot shouldn’t come as such a shock. After all, this is the......

Drug Trials

Sara Catania
L.A. County‘s Department of Mental Health is considering a proposal to allow testing of experimental psychotropic drugs on more than 2,000 gravely disabled patients under its care. The plan has alarmed patient advocates and others in the mental-health field concerned about possible conflicts of interest and potential ethical and human-rights......

Screen Test

Sara Catania
Photo by Debra DiPaoloTHE FEATURED FILM AT THE EGYPTIAN THEATER'S opening gala last December was Cecil B. De Mille's The Ten Commandments -- a fitting choice for an event that many in attendance considered nothing short of a miracle. The American Cinematheque, a tiny nonprofit exhibition group little known outside......
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Taylor’s Steakhouse

Sara Catania
Sure, there are other, newer and fancier joints for feasting on big hunks of red meat, but for sheer value, and the rah-rah factor, Taylor’s Steakhouse is tough to beat. Located in the same windowless mid-Wilshire cavern since it opened as a pub in 1953, Taylor’s caters to a fiercely......
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Philippe, The Original

Sara Catania
Photo by Ted Soqui When considering one of L.A.’s oldest restaurants, it’s important, first, to get the name right. Don’t say Fil-Leap; say Fil-Leap-A. It’s pronounced in three syllables with the accent on the leap, the way restaurant founder Philippe Mathieu intended. That’s how they say it when you call......
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Bob Burns

Sara Catania
Just around the corner from Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, but far from the madding crowd, sits the kind of restaurant that embodies every child’s notion of fine dining: white tablecloths, dim lights, piano bar, roomy Naugahyde booths and, of course, grown-up food. Where other, lesser steak houses have failed,......

UnLucky Strike

Sara Catania
WHEN MIKE REYNOLDS AND 400 OR SO OF HIS closest friends traveled to Sacramento in April 1993 to show their support for an obscure anti-crime bill called "Three Strikes and You're Out," nobody paid them -- or the bill -- much attention. Who in their right mind, after all, would......

Air Power

Sara Catania
Photo by Virginia Lee Hunter When the L.A. Times published A regional map for this year’s Festival of Books, it represented the city of Pasadena with a drawing of a KPCC radio tower and the name Larry Mantle, a moniker synonymous with all good things that spring from the Pasadena......
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The Handyman

Sara Catania
Carolyn See’s sixth novel begins in the year 2027, with a historian writing a grant application to study the early work of the famous artist Robert Hampton, who, "by most accounts, had been among the first to cast off the debilitating angst of the 20th century, and the ever more......