You’ve seen the spray-painted slogans. Now wear...

You’ve seen the spray-painted slogans. Now wear one!

A South-Central Los Angeles company is producing graffiti-style T-shirts in an effort to give area youths a job. There’ll be no advertisements for gangs such as the Crips and Bloods--”We’re not pushing gang slogans,” said Leon Watkins, who’s overseeing the operation--but some of the creators may once have belonged to those groups.

In fact, some of the graffiti-ized garments satirize gangs, such as one that pictures a man in a clown costume and gang hat saying, “I ain’t no joke.” Another shows a gang member, spray can in hand, and quotes a Run-D.M.C. lyric, “You be illin’ “--street jargon for stupid. A third carries a drawing of drugs crossed out by a diagonal line with the caption, “Way to Loose (sic), So Don’t Use.”

“We’ve got 14 kids involved so far, a lot of them ex-gang members,” Watkins said. “This gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment. Plus it gives them a chance to learn about business.”

The T-shirts, which sell for $15, are currently only available at the Family Help Line community service operated by Watkins, but he’s received one outside order--from the bookstore at the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown.

“We’ve asked them to design a special shirt that has an image of our new building on Bunker Hill and possibly the MOCA name,” said store manager Pam Richey. “We think of them (the T-shirts) as an original artwork, especially with the graffiti-style lettering.”

Hidden Hills is one city that can boast of an absence of mud slinging in its municipal election campaign. Also, an absence of candidates.

In fact, when the two incumbents were the only people to file for City Council seats for today’s election in the San Fernando Valley city, it was canceled. The council, as permitted by state law, appointed Mayor Kathleen D. Bartizal and Mayor Pro Tem H. Brian Herdeg to their old jobs.

Bartizal said she isn’t sure why the volunteer council positions have such low appeal, unless it’s the long hours for no pay.

After all, Hidden Hills is a town where the average house sold for $788,000 last year and where the council has debated such issues as whether the wife of actor-singer John Davidson could have lights on her tennis court. She got around one restriction by explaining that the lights were for her back yard trampoline.

Snatched from your parents . . . raised by hand-held puppets . . . thrown out into the world at the age of seven months . . .

Life can be sort of wild if you’re an Andean condor.

The vulturettes are participating in an experimental effort at the Los Angeles Zoo that may aid in saving the nearly extinct California condor.

The zoo recently received two Andean condor eggs from the Dallas Zoo. The eggs will be hatched in incubators, after which the condors will be raised by workers wearing hand puppets that are painted to look like Mom and Dad.

“We don’t want them to imprint with humans--growing up thinking they’re humans,” said Susie Kasielke, a senior animal keeper. The puppets, which can preen and feed the baby condors, won’t even make human sounds.

At seven months, the condors will be released in Ventura County and monitored to determine how well they survive in the wild. The hope is that the same technique can be used with eggs of the California condor, of which 27 survive worldwide. (The Andean condor is more numerous.)

In the meantime, more Andean condor eggs may be on the way to Los Angeles, if Dallas experts can confuse the parents who supplied the first two there.

The Andeans, which normally produce one egg every two years, laid one in February. After zoo officials whisked it away, the condor couple searched unsuccessfully for it, then mated again and produced a second egg two months later. It, too, was egg-naped.

Zoo officials hope the birds mate a third time this year, if they’re not too confused, or too tired.