Hulbert Waldroup, That Thuggish-Looking, Cop-Baiting Artist; Some Art-Gallery Crap; Bad Pop Songs and Bulgarian Music; Big Fun at Lot 61, Don Hill's and Sway

"It's interesting to me that the police would be so offended by Klan headdresses," he says, crisp speech betraying his hometown?Chicago, where everyone talks like a news anchor. "I'm a very capable artist, and portraiture is my specialty. I think I am doing the cops a favor by showing them in Klansmen hoods, instead of using their actual faces."

Waldroup has been here before. A self-taught painter who usually works with oil and canvas, he made it onto CNN in 1997 with an oversize piece, Saturday Night at the Devil's Palace, which showed Jesus and the devil at a table, eating body parts. "I imagined that they would meet up on Saturday night to have a few drinks and smoke cigarettes and divide up souls, so I painted them with a bottle of Martel, hotdogs with penises inside and ear-kebabs," says Waldroup.

His current work?his first mural?got started a little over a year ago. "I came to Diallo's house and read all the graffiti and notes that people had left there. It moved me spiritually. Thankfully, a chance meeting with a bodega owner resulted in me painting the mural on the outside of his store. Diallo had been a friend of the store owner's, and a good customer."

Waldroup entered a very specific headspace to complete his project. "I painted it through Amadou's eyes... I am heavily into meditation and remote viewing, which some people call a controlled out-of-body experience or astral projection. When I work, it's meditation. I am not there."

His next date with being not there is the "Manhattan Project," a multipart series of outdoor murals. "I'm looking for a site in Manhattan for my first installment. It will be a mural of what a police officer sees when he is racially profiling. Seen through his eyes."

The Diallo pastiche, called The American Dream, has fast become a shrine in the Bronx at the corner of Wheeler Ave. and Westchester Ave. Take the 6 to Elder Ave. if you want to see it. More of Waldroup's work is viewable at www.popportraits.com, where you can test his "capable artistry" by commissioning one of his portraits.

...Art dealers make a big push during spring, because sales flatten out in the summertime, so there are a few galleries open right now that deserve your money/scorn. Over at Debs & Co. (525 W. 26th St., 2nd fl., betw. 10th & 11th Aves., 643-2070), Joy Garnett is exhibiting a series of paintings called Rocket Science?simply put, big pictures of planes blowing up, many modeled after real-life news photos.

Sometimes a room just isn't a room until it has that 60-by-48-inch rendering of the Challenger disaster. Unfortunately, Garnett's paintings range from $1500 to $6000, so for solace you might need to head three blocks south to B&E Quality Beverage Inc., the biggest discount beer outlet I've seen in Manhattan (511 W. 23rd St., betw. 10th & 11th Aves., 243-6559). Inside B&E, you'll find everything from La Guillotine Belgian Ale ($2.75 a bottle) to Skullsplitter Orkney Ale ($9.95 for four bottles, but it splits skulls) to cases of Beck's Light ($23.95, ugh). When you buy the beer, you have to pay a deposit, which means forking over an additional five cents for every can/bottle purchased, but you still come out ahead. The warehouse in back attests to the availability of kegs.

...Continuing with art, Mark Tribe of Rhizome.org curates the just-opened net.ephemera show at Moving Image Gallery (414 B'way at Lispenard St., 3rd fl., 431-4741) throughout the month. This one works on a simple concept: the Internet, the most important artistic medium to come around since video, is difficult to show in a museum. So instead, Rhizome.org presents the notes, receipts and coffee-stained jottings of Net artists like John Cabral, Diane Ludin and Andy Deck.

It's pretty ridiculous. You walk into a room to see a wall tacked with looseleaf paper, scribbles and computer printouts, sort of like those Johnny Walker "Keep Walking" subway ads. But Mark Tribe has some kind of scheme going?he's not itching to sell any of the individual "pieces" because a museum is getting in line to buy them all. Go on a Friday before 4 p.m., marvel at the balls of this project, get some dinner and head next door to the Bulgarian restaurant "Mehanata" around 1 a.m. (416 B'way at Canal St., 625-0981). The DJs there spin a nice mix of bad pop songs and Bulgarian music, bringing out equal numbers of NYU coeds and scrungy Bulgarian men. Both enjoy dancing.

...Mini-blurbs from a Thursday on the west side: Began in Lot 61 (550 W. 21st St., betw. 10th & 11th Aves., 243-6555), where Caron Bernstein just started her new weekly party, "Lizzy and Caron's Big Night Out." Avoid the fliers, which make it look like some sort of Chuck E. Cheese anniversary when it's really a decent event with a huge, metallic setting, plenty of brunettes and Caron on turntables near the roof reminding you how good "Natural One" is. Drinks are expensive, but there's no cover. None.

From Lot 61, a chance encounter with a female brought me down to Don Hill's (511 Greenwich St. at Spring St., 219-2850), whose $10 cover was sidestepped by a member of our tribe (the guy who looked like R. Crumb had an in). Don Hill's was a blast?packed with college freshmen drinking Coronas and whooping to "Sweet Child O' Mine," plus minor?minor?celebrities like Chloe Sevigny's brother. Bonus: that really old, scraggly thin-haired blond guy was there! You know who I mean?he shows up at Luahn, Meow Mix, Arlene Grocery, etc. in a black t-shirt, grooves in his own corner and likes foreign girls because "they're more accepting of older men." His name is Robert. Say hi. He rocks out.

Final stop was Sway (305 Spring St., betw. Greenwich & Hudson Sts., 620-5220), right across the street from Don Hill's and throbbing up until 4 a.m. There's no cover. The door policy isn't bad as long as you're from New York and there's a girl in your group, and inside, circular couches ensure maximal eye contact. When the lights came on at the end of the night, the crowd made the most childish collective moan I've ever heard. Cute. So many people still learning how to be adults.