July 17, 1994

FOR THE CYNICAL, ALL POLITICS is local, and the local perspective is a recipe for disaster: ignorance, Nimby selfishness, isolationism, tribal and racial strife. Yet popular culture, especially popular music, has a way of turning real-world troubles inside-out, and it is not pop's cynics but its idealists who have come to believe that all of the best music is local, made by hometown bands for hometown fans. It is pop's job to carry that music -- or at least its most accessible efforts -- from the periphery to the broader public. Starting on Tuesday, bands from all over the United States converge on New York City, hoping to be heard by taste makers and music moguls in town for the New Music Seminar. It's a five-day suspension of the new rules in rock, which decree that a regional following is better than a glimmer of national attention. Lately, those music moguls have been spending much of their time racking up frequent-flyer miles on the way to cities and towns that never expected to be on the rock-and-roll map.

A MAN ON THE MOON The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts. By Andrew Chaikin. Illustrated. 670 pp. New York: Viking. $27.95. MOON SHOT The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon. By Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton with Jay Barbree and Howard Benedict. Illustrated. 383 pp. Atlanta: Turner Publishing. $21.95.

WHERE other people saw only a large granite rock, Pedro P. Hurtado saw an iguana. Now, the iguana has to find a new home. Mr. Hurtado, 54, a White Plains resident, spent 652 hours over two and a half years transforming the rock, which he estimates to weigh at least five tons, into a carved lizard. It sits in front of what was the home of Ronald and Maria Iles, on Rockcliff Place in North White Plains. Now the Ileses are selling the house. So the sculpture has to go.

In this border town, once a gracious spa favored by Rwanda's rich and powerful, hundreds of weary and dirty families were camped today, waiting until they could cross the border, hoping to flee the country before the arrival of rebel troops, who were only 10 miles away. If the rebels come, the refugees can be certain they will get no protection from what is left of the Rwandan Army. The Government soldiers here today guzzled beer, wantonly fired their weapons and looted expensive lake-front villas.

AL LYNCH looked like an ordinary baseball fan, one of a crowd of several dozen parents and spectators attending a recent game at Cherokee High School in Evesham Township, in Burlington County. Wearing a straw hat to shade him from the blistering sun, Mr. Lynch, 74, folded his tall frame into a beach chair and chatted with an umpire before the game. "Call 'em right," he joshed in a voice resonant with the sound of his native New England.