All Is Vanity, Nothing is Fair

GREEDON Carter The promotional juggernaut for Spy: The Funny Years continues apace. This week, Bergdorf Goodman magazine editor and non-cater waiter Michael Gross kindly posted PDFs of his three-way interview with Graydon Carter, Kurt Andersen (whose last name, apparently, can sometimes be spelled with an "o"), and some nobody writer. (It's available on Gross's personal site and summarized in a newspaper's gossip column.)

In the interview, Carter and Andersen do their best to shore up their early indie bona fides ("We both had our nose in the door..." and "we were kind of on a mission..."), with Carter waxing nostalgic for their days as young-ish editors barely getting by on slave wages.

"We never made any money," laments Carter. "We were paid like—don't listen to this, George—$150,000 each at the highest point."

It's a miracle the two were able to survive. We remember when we made $150,000 back in the day, too. A diet of canned Spaghettios can wreak havoc on a bespoke wardrobe. Wait, did he say $150,000? Using the U.S. Department of Labor's Inflation Calculator, that's $244,112.90 each in 2006 dollars, which is roughly four times the median salary in New York City.

What's the inflation rate on planet Graydon? You can't make this stuff up. We tried.

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