To start, a few words on Vanity Fair: I'm not a regular reader (if I want pop culture glossified and presented to the trendy-if-safe, above-average-incomes crowd, I'll stick with The New Yorker, thank you very much). So my experience with the book is slim, but I will say this: if the recession has really affected magazine ad buys, you wouldn't know it from checking out VF. One flips through approximately (and pay attention, because while this sounds like a gross generalization, it's actually fairly accurate) one-hundred-and-fifty pages before getting to the actual meat of the issue. And the meat, sad to say, is chicken-fried steak. (Which, for readers who may be unfamiliar with the concept, sucks.)

Before I get to the actual articles, a quick note on Graydon Carter's Editor's Letter. I assume that anyone who reads Blogcritics is fairly media savvy to begin with, so you certainly don't need me to tell you that the man is a self-obsessed, insufferable prick. Still, all you need to do is read the actual letter and it's impossible to come away with any other impression of the man but that, goddamn, he's really a self-obsessed, insufferable prick. Leading off with the profound assertion that music "re-ignites whatever sentiments I had attached to it, and I'm back to where I was when I heard it the first time, or perhaps the last time," Carter, in the space of six short paragraphs, establishes his 24-karat idiocy with a series of supposedly revealing anecdotes about his father and his record collection that, surely, an editor with colleagues unafraid to point out his ridiculousness would never allow to see the light of day.

Anyway, the articles. Or, to start at the beginning, the cover. VF's cover is a three-panel fold-out with "The Women of Rock" flanking an unforgivably pimpified Barry White. Before I get into the semiotics of the cover girls, a quick word on fold-outs: I understand that there's only so much image space on a magazine cover. But when you feature a lineup of stars, surely you realize that they can't all be included in the front panel that sells your book on the newsstand. So the decision to put Gwen Stefani, J. Lo, Sheryl Crow, and Alicia Keys facing front, while Barry White, Debbie Harry, and Shirley Manson (arguably the least buzzworthy subjects of the shot) bring up the rear, wouldn't be based on anything as crass as commercialism, would it?