Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Kurt Andersen: "(Graydon Carter) Has Always Wanted a Clubhouse"



(image via theobserver)

All-too-Canadian editor E. Graydon Carter always struck The Corsair as a "clubby" sort of chap (Said with an air of restrained laughter). How else could he wear his hair the way he wears his hair without the clubby trappings of the fortress-like walls of Conde Nast, a buffer zone between Graydon Carter and the ruthless atomic-wedgie givers of the world (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

Graydon himself turned his snooty little neighborhood in Connecticut into a sort of Crusader Castle, standing athwart the savage Connecticut hordes (Like, for example, those unheralded "Aryans from Darien"). And now he does the same with Waverly Inn. From that salmon-colored weekly:

"'New York’s always had club-like restaurants, whether you’re talking about ‘21,’ the Grill Room, or Michael’s, or Elaine’s,' said the writer Michael Gross, who last visited the Waverly on March 11. Sunday appears to be the Waverly’s one slow night; Mr. Gross had only Calvin Klein and Anne Hathaway to rub shoulders with.

"'Elaine’s was the 60’s, Max’s Kansas City was the 70’s, Odeon was the 80’s, Da Silvano was the 90’s—maybe the Waverly Inn is the oughts,' Mr. Gross added.

"Mr. Carter’s friends confirm that such a notion would be the sweetest of music to the editor’s ears.

"'Even before we started Spy, he’s always wanted to start a clubhouse,' said Mr. Carter’s friend and co-founder at Spy magazine, Kurt Andersen. 'We’d be walking around Time Square, and he’d look up at different buildings and say, ‘Well, that could be a clubhouse there, and that could be clubhouse there.’"

That's Graydo for you. The normal red-blodded man would be awestruck at the savage audacity of the Felliniesque fleshshow that was once Times Square. Graydo, aesthete, Canadian, is already planning the architecture and interior design of his imaginary little boite.

Wedgie candidate? We report, you decide ...

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