Gary Panter

Do we really know all we should about how Robert F. Kennedy was killed 19 years ago at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles? Can we really be sure Sirhan Sirhan acted alone when 95% of the evidence (an estimated 50,000 documents including interviews with 75 eyewitnesses and 2,500 photographs) remains locked up in governmental files? Investigative reporter Dan E.

The visage of Michael Jackson, all eyeliner and attitude, is a standard sight in your average record store. At BeBop Records in Reseda, though, there aren't any photos of the ubiquitous "Bad" boy on the walls, and his latest platinum album is nowhere to be found in the J bin. But the customer doesn't want Michael, anyway. He wants a recording by Wanda Jackson, an obscure rockabilly singer from the 1950s whose country recordings were a cross between Patsy Cline and Little Richard.

Steve Turner's deep, unrelenting desire to have interesting things around led him to research and collect books, posters, furniture and ceramics. His enthusiasm for the objects he collected and for sharing information about the artists who created them moved him to open a gallery with a colleague four years ago. The gallery, now called the steve turner gallery (yes, spelled with no capital letters), specializes in an eclectic mix of art from the first half of the 20th Century.

Playing a silver- and gold-colored accordion slung over her black-clad frame, Carrie Lauer waited patiently in the smoke-filled cafe for the owner of the theater next door. She was on her third cup of cappuccino and had almost exhausted her repertoire before Fred Hicks walked by. Lauer, a librarian at Brand Library in Glendale, regularly plays her music and meets her friends at the Onyx Cafe in Silver Lake.

Playing a silver- and gold-colored accordion slung over her black-clad frame, Carrie Lauer waited patiently in the smoke-filled cafe for the owner of the theater next door. She was on her third cup of cappuccino and had almost exhausted her repertoire before Fred Hicks walked by. Lauer, a librarian at Brand Library in Glendale, regularly plays her music and meets her friends at the Onyx Cafe in Silver Lake.

In 1956, a 23-year-old named Stan Brakhage received an offer to work on the television show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Brakhage had come to Hollywood to work with Charles Laughton on an adaptation of "The Naked and the Dead." But by the time Brakhage hit Hollywood, Laughton was off the project and the young filmmaker was fielding the Hitchcock invitation. Brakhage didn't pursue the offer.

Ian Schrager has seen the future of New York night life, and it is . . . hotels. The onetime nightclub impresario who, with his late partner Steve Rubell, created Studio 54, the decadent disco den of the '70s, and Palladium, the supermarket-sized dance palace of the '80s, has now set his sights on hotels as the place to see and be seen. Actually, one hotel in particular--his latest venture, the Paramount.

FOR at least 20 years, comics and cartoons have been recognized as lingua franca in the work of contemporary artists. They're everywhere you look, both as fundamental influence and outright appropriation, and there are lots of reasons why. For one, art has become a global conversation. Comics, born a century ago, are among the oldest and most established forms of mass art. Their raw symbolism and satirical stylization provide a comprehensible form of communication across cultures.

The "art of losing," wrote poet Elizabeth Bishop, "isn't hard to master." I agree, and I think that all art is in some broad way deeply tied into what's lost and how. To be human, by definition, is to wage a losing battle for survival. For many artists, the waxing and waning of their creative powers -- seemingly capricious -- is merely an extension of the futile battle to live on past the allotted time.

It's The Season in Manhattan, perhaps the best time to visit. Brisk weather. Big art openings. Broadway theater. New fall fashions in department stores and SoHo boutiques. You'll need a place to stay. With the recent openings of a couple of dozen new hotels and newly refurbished favorites, the options have been extended from Midtown up the East and West sides down into Lower Manhattan--each area now a destination in itself.