Let's begin by saying that, yes, here in The Mediator we have taken our share of shots at Vanity Fair. But this month we come not to bury Vanity Fair, but to praise it. We recently had occasion to retreat to a cottage in the wilds of northern Ontario for a few days and, as such, reluctantly toted along a copy of the September VF for a little lakeside reading. We say "reluctantly" because, while VF can be perfect vacation fluff, the whole point of an Emersonian retreat into nature is to escape the hullabaloo of modern culture and its obsessions with celebrity and consumerism -- obsessions that Vanity Fair usually services in the manner of a docile stable boy cowering at the stockinged legs of an aristocratic French-Court couple.

There was a time, however -- and not that long ago -- that VF was a fairly dependable mix of, yes, celebrity dross and, yes, outlandish wealth on unironic parade, but also of crackerjack writing, thoughtful essays, and textured articles on issues and events that you really wanted to read textured articles about, at exactly the moment you wanted to read them. (My own personal highlight was the piece about two years or so ago that detailed the strange, obsessive crusade being waged against Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane by the headmaster of his former private school. It was exactly the kind of story Vanity Fair used to do often, and well: timely, interesting, and a little too salacious for a more staid competitor like The New Yorker.)

Which is to say that when Vanity Fair gets it right, it really gets it right. It just hasn't been getting it right for a very long while. Recently, VF's been a bit a train wreck: the crass, over the top, quasi-ironic coverlines ("We're Having A Jennifer Lopez Moment. Just Go With It!"); the abundance of target-free semi-satire like the Nan Darien columns; the increased prominence given to the Spitting Image puppet that is Dominick Dunne (I'm sure there are people who want to read him, but does anyone want to see him?); and, last but not least, the relentless focus on all things "It," as determined by Vanity Fair and personified, apparently, by Gwyneth Paltrow on one hand and the Hilton sisters on the other.

Flipping through the September issue of VF, however, felt both surprising and familiar; it's the first issue in a long time that seemed to nail what was once the classic Vanity Fair mix. First off, there's the double whammy of columns by Christopher Hitchens and James Wolcott. Say what you will about the former and his scattershot contrarianism, but he's dependably interesting and consistently engaging. ["And he'll be the first to tell you so." -- Wing Chun] He's not, however, the best magazine columnist around, or even in VF; that title would belong to James Wolcott. Wolcott is about the only writer alive who could make us care about -- much less read, much less enjoy -- a piece on fossilized news something-or-other Barbara Walters. Why do we love Wolcott so? Because he's dedicated to crafting prose that quickens your pulse and crackles like Jiffy Pop. Because of sentences like this: "Perhaps this A-list drop-off reflects the paucity of totemic Schwarzenegger-Stallone- Eastwood-Sharon Stone megastars in a period characterized by the proliferation of beautiful semi-somebodies whose flat tummies and sunshine faces suggest a bumper crop of test-tube babies." That sentence just makes us smile.

Of course, Hitchens and Wolcott have been VF mainstays for a while, and in too many months their buoyant writing hasn't been enough to keep a leaden issue afloat. (Plus, they usually don't appear together, except in the ad-fat fall issues.) Many is the time I've found myself at the newsstand, staring down at Cameron Diaz or Natalie Portman and wondering whether Wolcott alone justifies the $4.55 (Canadian) price of admission. But in this issue, for once, there's some middle-of-the-order muscle to back up the lead-off hitters. There's a solid story on the Woody Allen-Jean Doumanian split that runs circles around the similar, thin-gruel-indeed piece in this month's issue of Manqué...er, Talk. The issue is further leavened with serious and well-executed columns on Clinton and the military, the false lure of the Spanish Civil War for American idealists in the '30s, and the increasingly lurid descent of baseballer Pete Rose.

The middle of the magazine is, alas, a little less stellar. Of course, there's the obligatory, entirely fact-free celebrity cover story; this month's subject is -- surprise! -- Penélope Cruz, who, thanks to her Ralph Lauren ads and ubiquitous cover features, has now appeared on 38% of all magazine pages printed in America in the past six months. Kevin Sessums is given the task of mining something of interest out of Cruz; by the end, he's so desperate for some telling details that he's scrutinizing her like a neurotic blind date. "She opens her purse and I see two CDs, U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind and Radiohead's Amnesiac. On a rack at her home are CDs of Cat Stevens, Gustav Mahler, Angelo Badalamenti, and Marilyn Manson." If he later rifled through her medicine cabinet, he doesn't share the contents.

The real misstep here -- and the piece that made me close the magazine, set it gingerly aside, and head down to the lake to clear my head and calm my nerves -- is "Ben and Dara Are In Love...And Nothing Else Matters," by Nancy Jo Sales. You may recognize Sales's name as the woman whose work most often appears in New York magazine, and who has staked out the "Upper East Side Rich Kids Gone Bad" beat all to herself. Here, she tells the story of Ben Greene and Dara Kenigsberg, two Upper East Side-dwelling teenagers who are in love and also wear lots of Prada. This article might have been more interesting if (a) Sales hadn't already written it for New York -- about four times, and (b) Vanity Fair weren't guilty of celebrating exactly these kind of uninteresting, self-indulgent scions month after month without any hint of criticism. There is no way under heaven and earth that the Hilton sisters should be of interest to anyone, but at least there is a teeny-tiny bit of justification in profiling them since they are, like it or not, famous in some twisted definition of the word. Ben Greene and Dara Kenigsberg are neither famous nor particularly interesting nor particularly representative of anyone except a miniscule subset of rich teenagers who live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. As such, reading this article was kind of like re-entering the suffocatingly self-absorbed world of Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You -- except at least that movie had nice-sounding songs in it. We're not betting folks, but we'd wager dollars to donuts that this article was: (a) previously rejected by New York; (b) given the go-ahead at VF because, in the wake of Lizzy Grubman's FuckYouWhiteTrashGate, some editor thought that "out-of-control rich kids" are a "hot" story; (c) stuck in at the last moment when the ad department sold a bunch of new ad pages; or (d) all of the above. No doubt Sales's endless series of stories about New York teenagers gone awry is all part of a higher calling -- like, say, a book deal. But considering that, at the end of it all, she can find no more interesting thing to say than "Teenagers often seem lost and will say stupid, overly-dramatic things when given the chance and will also get themselves in trouble, especially if they have inattentive parents," we find it hard to imagine that anyone in the world is interested in reading about this, aside from jittery parents on the Upper East Side, Graydon Carter, and grumpy Fametrackers stuck at the cottage.

Balancing out the Cruz and "Ben And Dara" pieces, however, is a good, brisk read on Martha Stewart and her Cosa-Nostra-esque "Omnimedia" empire. Stewart's rise has been chronicled before, and her brand of anal-retentive housewares S&M has certainly been thoroughly analyzed elsewhere, so writer Matt Tyrnauer does the smart thing and simply takes the reader along on a voyeuristic tour of her world. Where else could you get a gem of a detail like Stewart walking into a general store in Maine, only to be confronted by a set of novelty napkins that read "Is Martha Stewart One Person"? Tyrnauer certainly doesn't go in for the kill, or even the maim, but he delivers something much richer than what's promised by the tepid, mollifying display for the article. ("...Her reflections on the father she misses, the moment she realized her marriage was in trouble, and the utter cluelessness of her critics...zzzzzzzzzz.") The article, "Empire By Martha," is exactly the kind of thing we'd find every month in VF, if God were in his Heaven and all were right with the world: a big, sprawling piece that exercises just enough of VF's muscle to get us into a world to which we wouldn't normally get access (with spiffy photos to boot). We can't, for example, imagine Stewart agreeing to open her life so fully to the scrutiny of, say, a writer from The New York Times Magazine. But if you're Vanity Fair, and you're spending that much time kissing all that celebrity ass, it only makes sense that, at some point, you should come up for air and call in your favours.