HACK ATTACK

What’s hot and what’s not in Los Angeles? Ask Prodigy, the national computer network, whose subscribers, those harbingers of hip, cast new light on the “Ins” and “Outs” in an on-line, ongoing city guide. Initiated in June, 1989, and updated regularly, the survey is written by Prodigy subscribers nationwide. Here’s an annotated view of our fair city, courtesy of the modem set.

* THE CLUB SCENE: Downtown’s Vertigo is where you’re “most likely to see someone vogueing,” but the crowd is “yuppie, elite, pushy and stuck-up--like New York.” Visit My Place, the jazz/soul club in Santa Monica, if you want to see a lot of “New Age yuppie types.”

* TOURIST HAUNTS: The La Brea Tar Pits are “pretty weird and smell funny”; Farmer’s Market has “terrible produce, rude people and some CBS stars”; Hollywood is “Hollyweird. . . . Going down Hollywood Boulevard is like sailing down a sewer in a glass-bottom boat”; Magic Mountain is “tacky, tacky, tacky. . . . The only magic is how they turn twenties into fives all day long,” and the Queen Mary/Spruce Goose tour is “dull and uninteresting.”

* HANGOUTS: Jerry’s Deli in Studio City is for “film folks and just plain Jewish yuppies,” the Hard Rock Cafe (Beverly Center) crowd is “young and dressed very L. A.-like,” and Melrose Avenue is “slipping into mall-dom.”

* WORST THINGS: The landslides, the long wait to see Johnny Carson, car phones, Santa Monica’s homeless, pickpockets, Pasadena’s photo-radar traps, the architecture, drinking water and Clippers games.

* BEST THINGS: This conspicuously short list includes San Pedro and other “unique” neighborhoods, Gorky’s early in the morning, horse ranches in Chatsworth, the Venice canals, Tommy’s burgers, scuba diving off Catalina, the downtown flower market, driving up the Malibu coast, the fact that you can find any record ever recorded, the many wonderful churches and the train ride to San Diego.