L.A. Observer : A columnist in bed with the bizarre : CIRCUS AMERICANUS,<i> By Ralph Rugoff (Verso: $18.95, paperback; 204 pp.)</i>

Ralph Rugoff has an amazing knack for digging up weird stuff. Well, that’s not entirely true: What he actually does is direct our attention toward places and events right under our noses that we take for granted, that have the capacity to blossom into things strange and beautiful when examined closely. Manhole covers, Los Angeles’ sewage system, nudist colonies, freeway overpasses--we’re all familiar with them, but they ignite Rugoff’s imagination and send him searching for pen and paper.

A native New Yorker and graduate of Brown University where he earned a degree in semiotics, Rugoff left school feeling a need for a change from Manhattan, which struck him at the time as suffocatingly inbred. In 1983 he came to L.A., where he found himself charmed by quirky oddities of the city that locals dismiss as business as usual, but outsiders find enchanting.

This collection of 40 essays, from 1992 to 1995, is broken down into five categories, the first of which explores theme parks and public spectacle. We visit nine sites--among them miniature golf courses, Universal CityWalk and Sea World--and come away struck by how very bizarre America’s perception of leisure has become. The next section examines strange events and rituals--Magic Johnson’s retirement from basketball, the Los Angeles Police Department’s annual destruction of weapons either confiscated from or surrendered by the public.

The third segment surveys privately owned boutique museums and includes several of the best essays in the book. Rugoff’s chronicle of visits to the Scientology Museum and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Museum are hilarious, and his piece on the Museum of Jurassic Technology--the subject of a recent book by Lawrence Weschler, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder”--is beautifully written. (For the record, Rugoff was singing the praises of the Jurassic Museum long before Weschler ever heard of it.) By the end of this section, Rugoff has made a solid case for his proposition that history is little more than a catalog of personal agendas and that the authority we automatically grant to museums should be challenged at every turn.

Part IV looks at various manifestations of Western culture’s obsession with the body--plastic surgery, supermodels. The final section is a sort of a catchall category loosely structured around the idea that mechanically reproduced images are invading and debasing every aspect of American life, from funeral homes to the courtroom. It’s here, in the strongest section of the book, that we find an exquisitely written essay on forensic photography and meet the man employed by the county to take pictures of every corpse that passes through the city morgue.

Like journalist Tom Wolfe, Rugoff is drawn toward the exotic and the extreme, but unlike Wolfe, he never sneers or talks down to his subject. When he’s on, his writing pivots on a sense of bewildered delight, and when he’s really on, his observations are wonderfully silly. Rugoff has a terrifically odd sense of humor and he should allow more of it into his writing, because it’s one of the most original things about him.

First published in the now-defunct Herald Examiner, Rugoff’s essays have appeared regularly since 1992 in the L.A. Weekly, where his official title is “art critic.” It’s a category he stretches to the very limit, and a penchant for violating boundaries conventionally used to organize life has been central to his writing from the start.

The way he writes, however, has changed significantly. Attempting to make the case that things usually dismissed as marginal low culture are worthy of intellectual analysis, Rugoff tended to overwrite when he began staking out his terrain. As he’s gained confidence in his ideas, he’s pared away the excess verbiage, and his writing has grown more relaxed and less didactic. He still lapses on occasion into an unbecoming, chastising tone, and the fun screeches to a halt whenever Rugoff delivers the moral of the story.

Rugoff may be aware that one Tom Wolfe is more than enough, however, as the prim voice of judgment is less and less an element in his work. But one must still take issue with his tendency to present as fact personal opinions that are highly debatable: “We are a populace which has learned to live in a permanent state of disbelief” is a good example here. This is much too sweeping a statement to be tossed off in passing, and grand pronouncements of this sort discredit Rugoff as a social critic.

Mostly though, his writing tends to be scrupulously researched and offers ample evidence to support its conclusions. Arguably the first writer since Joan Didion to train this fresh an eye on the city of Los Angeles, Rugoff is doing important work, and doing it well.