I had sworn off Vanity Fair. Yes, it's had its moments over the last few years. (Pulling its pages off the press at the last minute to insert a Carolyn Bessette photo essay after JFK's plane crash -- in the very same month that Tina Brown's Talk was scheduled to debut -- was one of the great magazine knockout punches of recent memory.) At its best, Vanity Fair has seemed like the platonic idea of what a celebrity-tilted general interest magazine with unlimited resources can be: namely, lots of pretty pictures and the occasional snappy article, all drenched in money and glamour and pure editorial clout. Think, for example, of the Hollywood portfolios they do every year around Oscar™ time. Yes, the photos are beautiful, but what's truly impressive is the sheer ambition of the project. The scheduling headaches! The travel nightmares! The elbow grease required to bring twenty-five or so big-name stars together with a handful of name-brand photographers! Or take, for another example, their recent Music Issue. The issue itself was a swing-and-a-miss, but what a swing! Look at that cover! Björk and Bono and Patti Smith and Chuck Berry and Mary J. Blige and Keith Fucking Richards! Together in the same studio!

(Digressive note to the Vanity Fair editors: Macy Gray -- bad mistake. Macy Gray will, over time, reveal herself to be the Gretchen Mol of the Music Issue cover. Moreover, the inclusion of Macy Gray set the tone for the whole issue's one-step-removed, what-are-the-kids-listening-to? feel. Her, and that article about how Madonna is a genius.)

And yet, I had sworn off Vanity Fair. The "It Girl" issue with Gwyneth Paltrow was the final straw. There may be someone in the world who wants to look at page after page of pictures of New York's It Girls [read: society scions whose dubious pseudo-fame is limited to the isle of Manhattan, and a subsection of whom are Condé Nast employees (!), a further subsection of whom are Vanity Fair employees (!!)], but that person is not me. The "It" issue was typical of Vanity Fair's recent slide into a blinkered, slobbering affection for all things "It" -- an expression that, like "hipness" and "class," immediately disqualifies anyone who uses it from actually possessing it.

Anyway, I had sworn off Vanity Fair. But I bought the most recent issue -- the Jude Law issue -- because the lovely Ms. F.U.N.K.L.E had a touch of the flu, and was looking for something glossy and stupid, and because I couldn't buy Talk magazine because the last time I bought Talk magazine I made Ms. F.U.N.K.L.E swear that if I ever brought it into our home again she would roll it into a tight little cylinder and jam it into my ear, hard. Because it's that bad. ["I would like to take this opportunity to express my solidarity with Ms. F.U.N.K.L.E. on that score. Every time I saw the recent Talk cover featuring Ben Affleck's smug-ass face, I was moved to punch it and wish it were him." -- Wing Chun] (I have not so ferociously loathed the incompetence of a magazine since I was stuck with an issue of David Lauren's Swing and three hours to kill in the Seattle airport. That unfortunate purchasing decision left me with a simmering vendetta against David Lauren, and two hours and fifty minutes to kill in the Seattle airport.)

So, what will you find in the Jude Law issue of Vanity Fair? Well, Jude Law, of course, with the inevitable coverline "Hey, Jude!" followed by this gem: "Is that Spielberg on line one? Tell him Jude Law is coming." It's almost unfathomable that Graydon Carter -- a founding editor of Spy magazine -- lets these kind of cornball shenanigans happen under his watch, but, hey, whatever fills the coffers.

The Jude Law article comes with many lovely pictures of the entirely great-looking Jude Law. I have no quibble with anyone who longs for Law; the incandescence of Law and Cate Blanchett presenting together at last year's Oscars™ nearly seared my retinas.

With some reluctance, I plowed into the accompanying profile, which, uncharacteristically, wasn't slobbering and embarrassing, just kind of boring. The author, Peter Biskind, wrote the well-regarded history of Hollywood-in-the-70s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and here he delivers a workmanlike biographical profile of Law, only once slipping into typical Vanity Fair gibberish, during a misguided passage early on about how water -- "alternately crystalline and reflective, mutable and fugitive" -- may well be Law's natural element. (Mutable and fugitive? Weren't those the two guys on Letterman?)

Otherwise, we learn that Law is a talented actor who's now hearing the siren call of Hollywood, but he's trying to resist, and wouldn't it be a shame if he abandoned the edgy roles he's done up to now? All of which essentially makes you think, Why not more pictures? The pictures are nice. Really, there must have been another dozen or so outtakes they could have squeezed in there. So...skip the article. Enjoy the pictures.

For hawk-eyed magazine watchers, however, the real drama in this issue of Vanity Fair is the further erosion of the magazine's self-heralded Fan Fair section, a monthly arts section launched this past spring with much...er, fanfare. Long story short, editor Graydon Carter hinted at the unveiling of the new section for issue after issue after issue: this was to be the centerpiece of the mag's redesign, which also included a few new fonts and a slightly altered logo. Now, following the Fan Fair section is like watching one of those movies in which a compact car full of test dummies crashes into a concrete wall in extreme slow motion: with each passing issue, Fan Fair crumples up and folds in on itself in a new and fascinating and strangely hypnotic way. Last month, they ditched Calendar Boy (Time magazine 'humor' columnist Joel Stein) whose job was to punctuate the monthly events calendars with funny quips like "April 15: Gala opening of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago. Directed by Terry Kinney, starring Gary Sinise. Attire: formal straitjackets." HAR! Stein has since been replaced by nobody, so that the calendar now features entries like "Opening at MOCA Los Angeles this month: multimedia artist Stan Douglas." HOO-HA!

This month, they also dropped the "In & Out" chart, perhaps after realizing that the "Ben Affleck: In; Casey Affleck: Out" and vice versa joke was only funny the first thirty-six months that they did it. In short, there's a definite feeling that the editors are engaged in a kind of glacially paced abortion of the whole section, which now consists mainly of press-release round-ups of new books, movies and CDs. Or, maybe, they're just "fine-tuning," and think the section's fine as it is, which is even scarier. In either case, now that Ms. F.U.N.K.L.E's over her flu, I won't be around to find out.