New York magazine’s current cover story (“Celebrity and Its Discontents,” by Vanessa Grigoriadis) is but the latest, and probably not the last, sign that it is now officially open season on celebs. Fueled by the unhinged antics of Tom Cruise et al and stoked by the demands of the tabloid press (is it just me or are you tired of reading about paparazzi?), the lid seems to be off. If TomBradBritneyRussell bugging makes them Bugs Bunny, it is, as Elmer Fudd opined, wabbit season.

When and why this happened has been subject to much speculation (TC firing Leslee Dart and hiring his sister as his publicist is one popular benchmark) — indeed, Grigoriadis’s piece speculates on the speculation in amusing fashion — but it does seem to mark an amazing double standard. We hate them, we love them and we can’t get enough of them, those gods and goddesses gamboling on Olympus there. Will there be a stop to the speculation sometime soon? If In Touch, Star, Us ad infinitum remain glutted with sometimes less-than-complimentary pictures and profiles of these wascally wabbits and their Jessicas will the supposedly more highbrow publications continue to write about the trend? Probably.

There was always a tipping point, even back in the day of studio cover, of Hedda and Louella. When Robt Mitchum got busted for pot they couldn’t keep it out of the papers — but he was so popular it mattered not a whit. (Russell Crowe could play him in a biopic.) In modern times, Whitney Houston had it coming for a long time. I profiled her for a fashion magazine ten years ago and the strain of — what? drugs? Bobby? her sexuality? — was already beginniing to show. More significantly, the people around her, from publicists to personal help, were already starting to grumble. And believe me, I wasn’t exactly doing investigative reporting. She was there to “wear clothes,” in the fashion mag parlance, and promote her new movie and album. And even though she lost her shit once in my presence and threw me out of the studio for no apparent reason, she came back the next day and made nice, charming me at the Polo Lounge, resplendent in dark glasses.

No more bounce backs for Whitney, unless you call her cameos on Being Bobby Brown a second act. It’s the kind Todd Browning, director of Freaks, would have appreciated. Having reduced celebs to the state of abject misery enjoyed by most regular folks — addiction, bad marriage, problems with the law — reality TV makes them chant along with us: Gabba-gabba-hey. One of us.

As much as I’m enjoying the Karl Rove saga, I can’t help but think it’s going to all come to naught. Bush’s loyalty combined with the public’s apathy (I really can’t believe the Dems can whip the avreage voter into a frenzy over a question of sourcing and confidentiality — even the question of a covert agent’s identity is confusing to many) means the ball will not be moved more than an inch on this one. And even if he leaves the White House he will just be running things from a undisclosed secure location, one that shares a cafeteria with Cheney’s.

But with Matthew Cooper’s version of events being published in Time today we get a rare glimpse of Rove’s working style. Having dished the dirt on Wilson’s wife, even if he wasn’t playing the Plame game, Rove feigned a moment of conscience. “I’ve already said too much,” he told the reporter, having just revealed that Ms. Wilson was a CIA operative. This is pure Mata Hari stuff: think of the woman in Help! who keeps telling Paul “I can say no more” about the plan of the Kali clan to sacrifice Ringo. Or Dianne Wiest in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, forever putting one gloved finger over John Cusack’s lips and admonishing him: “Don’t speak.” Who knew Karl had such a flair for melodrama? “The memory of that line has stayed with me a couple of years now,” Cooper told CNN’s Howard Kurtz yesterday.

In other movie references, Cooper revealed that the “double super secret background” line he used in an email to describe the status under which Rove spoke was inspired by Animal House, in which Delta House was put on “double secret probation.” Perhaps the NY Times’s Judith Miller, who has gone to prison to protect the identity of the person who may or may not have told her Wilson’s wife was a spook, will get to yell “Food fight!” in the cafeteria.

Greetings! It seems apt that my first official post goes up just before midnight since this is about the only time I can find to write. The CD player has just shuffled — Johnny Cash, “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” to the Nevilles covering “The Rivers of Babylon” — on some logic of its own and I’m headed for bed my ownself, sure to be asleep long before my daughter and her cousins who are upstairs watching MTV, which doesn’t seem to actually show music videos anymore.

The weather in New York is dank and humid, fog like steam is obscuring the top of the Williamsburg Bank clock tower, which will not be the tallest building in Brooklyn anymore if Bruce Ratner has anything to say about it. Ft. Greene has changed since we moved here, almost eight years ago. Some of the townhouses on my side of the street have been selling for over a million dollars, which means the people who bought and renovated them don’t actually have to be here when the weather is like this. They have summer homes, I suspect, leaving their stoops to be inhabited by the crackheads and winos who usually congregate in the little park at the end of the block. Things, in other words, have changed to remain the same. At least locally.

I got an email from our old neighbor Ishbel the day of the London bombings. She had relocated there after 9.11, in search of some sense of safety; you can read her story in “Escaped from New York” on the Articles page. She is expecting another child and is no doubt reconsidering the wisdom of her move. Meanwhile the local Brooklyn paper declared our local subway hub, the Atlantic Avenue station, “a prime target for terrorists.” The cops and National Guardsmen on duty down there seem to agree.

The stereo has shuffled past Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys (“That Old Steel Guitar Rag”) to Richard Thompson doing “You Dream Too Much” (“All my life I’ve been like this/I start thinking of a perfect kiss”) — “It’s gonna end bad,” he assures us but I just saw RT, playing for free right across from where the World Trade Center once stood and he was doing all right. Dressed all in black on a sultry summer evening but there wasn’t anything mournful about it. Even his signature signoff, “The Dimming of the Day,” didn’t sound so sad.

Y’all come back now, here?