Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s top legal adviser sat down this week with a dozen reporters, methodically walking them through each of the 81 long-awaited wording changes to the mayor’s legislative plan for the Los Angeles Unified School District. But the presentation also served a second purpose — as a primer on how to thoroughly screw a school board.

Speaking in the emotion-free verbiage of a law professor, attorney Thomas Saenz said the Gloria Romero Education Reform Act of 2006 will allow the school board to approve the superintendent’s budgets, yet deny it the ability to vote on line-item expenditures. The bill will let the board hire a superintendent, yet allow the mayor to reject its choice. And while the board will technically still exist, individual members won’t even be allowed to hire their own staff — a change that will keep them more focused on policy, Saenz dryly noted.

"I will attend every rally necessary to speak out in defense of Israel. Period. With respect to the idea that I've somehow vacillated on the issue, nothing could be further from the truth. If you read the articles in the newspaper that talked about my meetings with Muslim leaders, what I apologized for was that they sent an email to a staffer in my office - 11 emails they say - we don't have record of that, but they claim they sent 11 emails, asking for a meeting. That person was lower level on my staff, not part of my scheduling staff, and what I said was, if you did that, I apologize for that. I'd love to meet with you. I certainly understand that as mayor I represent all of the people.

But let me be absolutely clear, so there's no question - I support the state of Israel and their right to exist. I oppose Hezbollah and Hamas and their attacks on the people of Israel, and I will not back away from that."

“Nineteen forty-five through 1950 was the only time we have not been at war in my lifetime,” Vidal tells me during a recent interview at his Hollywood Hills home. “Five years. That’s all we had. In ’50, we got the Korean War. After that, nothing but war. Between ’45 and ’50, we were ahead in music with the whole world. We were ahead in poetry. We were ahead in the ballet, something we’ve never been noted for before; ahead in the theater, with Tennessee and Arthur Miller. There was, in five years, this great burst of culture, because we had been repressed – first by the Depression for some 20 years, and then by World War II.”

The mural is a critical visual link between the past and present, between the Mexican mural renaissance — led by Siqueiros and the other “tres grandes,” Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco — and the Chicano and later multiculturalist muralist movement that swept Los Angeles and the Southwest in the 1970s and ’80s.

This fact hardly came up when city and Getty officials gathered with local arts figures at the Olvera Street plaza for a news conference to announce the revival plans. Villaraigosa called América Tropical a “cultural treasure” and only briefly mentioned that the Siqueiros mural is the “prototype for the murals that began appearing on the Eastside and in other neighborhoods of the city.”