In April 1965, Harper’s Bazaar unveiled an edition of the magazine guest-edited by photographer Richard Avedon and dedicated to “the off-beat side of Now.” Borne of a moment of upheaval not unlike the one we’re currently living in, the issue explored the people and ideas that were shaping the era. Sixty years later, we’re marking its anniversary by talking to some of our own era’s most influential figures and faces about the idea of the Now.
Here’s the problem in general with this idea: I believe pretty strongly that there is no now now. Because we live in an era—or you can say a moment, but it’s unfortunately longer than a moment—where things are not now. They’re either then or when. There doesn’t seem to be a present.
I mean, I believe there’s a present, but I believe myself to be alone in this because everything is about what happened before or what is going to happen. We live in a world with millions of people telling you the future, even though of course no one knows. And we live in a world, especially a country, totally fixated on the past. Trying to make the past into the present doesn’t work. It has a lot of harmful effects, but it doesn’t really work, as they will see.
People ask me all the time, what’s going to happen now? I think truthfully that if I knew the future, I wouldn’t buy the wrong lottery ticket every week. So I don’t know the future, and neither does anyone else. And unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know the past. People are suffused with nostalgia, which is, I think, one of the most destructive things there are in the world. The odd thing is how many kids, by which I mean people in their 20s, have nostalgia for an era they didn’t even live through. I mean, nostalgia in its most acceptable form, to me, is personal. It’s for your childhood.
I was 14 when [the 1965 Richard Avedon guest-edited issue of Harper’s Bazaar] came out. I’m 74 now. Being 14 was so horrible. I’d rather be 74. No one wants to be 74 unless they’re 78, but I promise you, being a 14-year-old girl—I’m sure it’s different now, but I bet it’s not much better. It is so hard to be a 14-year-old girl that there’s not a single 40-year-old man who could be a 14-year-old girl for even a week. That’s how hard it is.
Now, I don’t have any of these modern devices. I don’t have a smartphone, a cell phone, a computer, a Wi-Fi connection in my apartment, a microwave oven. If you told me I could text on a microwave oven, I would believe you. But I am aware of the effect of the internet, which is suffocating. One of the things it does is flatten everything. It flattens geography and also time. Kids see images, and they’re always coming up to me saying, “Oh, this looks so great!” But images are not life. I know this is a shock to people.
I think that the idea of being interested in the future and looking forward to the future, that’s in the past. Because people dread the future now. The planet is melting. There’ll be no water. This I don’t understand, but apparently there will be no water. There’ll be no water, or there’ll be too much water, depending upon where you live. AI, I don’t understand. To me, it seems just like stealing. But everyone asks me all the time, are you afraid of AI? Are you worried about it? Maybe I’d be more worried about it if I understood it.
Not understanding things is helpful to not being worried. I have to point that out. So if you’re a very stress-free person, you are not paying attention or you don’t understand. I’m more worried about human intelligence than I am worried about artificial intelligence.
Two days after Election Day, I was in an airport lounge. There was one person at the bar, and there was a TV set over the bar. It was tuned to some sporting event. I asked the bartender, “Could you please turn the TV for one second to CNN?” “We’re not allowed.” I said, “I know.” So there was this woman sitting there. She was on her computer. I said, “Would you mind if they turned this TV on for one minute to CNN?” And she said, “I don’t care. I’m not watching the news for the next four years.”
Here’s the thing about that. You can not watch the news. It doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It’s happening whether you watch it or not. It’s affecting you. And it may make you more relaxed, but you must feel some dread, like “I know horrible stuff is happening,” but which horrible stuff is that?
When Donald Trump entered politics in 2015 and then became the president and then became not the president, I developed a habit I never had in my life, which is the second I would walk into my apartment, I’d turn on the TV. Someone asked me once, “Why do you do that?” I said, “Because I’ve been out of the apartment for five hours. We could be at war with Sweden. Who knows?” At the moment, it’s impossible to keep up.
In politics, revenge is horrible. In my personal life, I have found revenge to be totally satisfying. When people say it’s not worth it, it’s not the best human response, that may be true, but it’s worth it for sure. And I will tell you that any time I’ve been able to wreak vengeance on someone, I have found it to be delightful. And even, or sometimes especially, if the person doesn’t know it was me, it lasts forever with me. Sometimes I’ll see someone—I mean, not deliberately, but I’ll see someone and I’ll think, “Did you ever wonder why you didn’t get that fellowship?” I know. It was me.
Nothing comes out of nowhere. The fact that everyone’s surprised by certain things is only because they don’t know what happened before. And I’m not talking about needing to be a scholar of 12th-century France. I’m saying, to have some sense of what happened in your own country even in the last 20 years. And they don’t know.
