There was lots of press, also from New York and countrywide. I launched our ‘Politicians are Criminals’ campaign.
MON 18 MAY – THURS 21 MAY NEW YORK
Flew back to New York and said goodbye to dear André for the moment. Treated ourselves to staying in the Carlyle Hotel. Met my dear friend Terry Doctor who is, among other things, an outstanding follower of fashion; he knows everything – also about politics.
Andreas is here to check a few things about the shop we will open and Laura and Christopher are working to choose an American PR. I told Terry I might not come for the shop opening. I might never come to New York again – I only travel if I have to.
We went to the Met to see the current exhibition – China: Through the Looking Glass (of fashion). Yves St. Laurent’s, Poiret’s and Dior’s designs from his Chinese collection were the stars of the show. Then we met Stella Schnabel and her sweet friend Theodora, Keith Richard’s daughter; she and Stella had been to the same school as our friend Paz. We got take-away pizza. I don’t like pizza but that’s what we did because the restaurants were too noisy and we met at our friend Sabina’s flat. I had spent the day with Sabina and Andreas because they wanted to look at second-hand clothes in Brooklyn. Sabina is a super stylist and queen of the flea markets. She will be helping again at our forthcoming shows.
I wish we had taken a photo of Stella – she was wearing an old dress and it suited her. She is riveting, her posture and her voice give her the authority of an oracle. She is an actress. Her latest project is original. My Hindu Friend. So original that I can’t remember what it is. We were enjoying each other so much and probably getting drunk. I must have told them about my politicians/criminals campaign.
FRI 22 MAY – SUN 24 MAY WOODSTOCK
Let’s look at a bit more of America, I had said, because I might not go again. So we went to stay in a house Sabina had bought in upstate New York. I enjoyed driving up through Harlem and over George Washington Bridge and into the green forests and rolling hills, like England on a much bigger scale, on an almost empty road. Three hours’ drive.
Sabina’s house is in Andes, not far from Woodstock, and like Ramsgate it is becoming more populated by people from the city, this time New York, living there or buying a second home. There are many more organic and vegetarian restaurants than in England. Here, but also in the city – and it’s the same in LA. This area was rich when New York was rising, supplying milk and other foods, but it lost importance with refrigeration and distribution from other parts and particularly from California. There are still farms but they are often abandoned. We went looking inside one: tools and machinery were all left rusting and on one floor were dummies for home dressmaking and effects of female life. On a shelf was a shoebox of letters. I took one, just pulled it out at random for this diary. It was dated January 1914:
Dear “Taffie”
I know I should have written sooner, but the drug store has kept me on the go, as usual.
First I want to tell you that I am writing on the stationery which my niece, Audrey, gave me. There are larger sheets, too.
I got 2 more Xmas presents which I didn’t tell you about. One is a tailored red cloth jacket with an open pleat in the back – it’s darling. I got a green sailor dress, too. I’m not so crazy about that, though.
I’d like to see your blue dress. I bet it’s cute. Do you think you can come up either for Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthday?
I got a card from my paratrooper last week saying his furlough is delayed. He’ll be home around the 15th, and that’s almost here. Oh boy!
We got our report cards the other day, and I got all 90s, excpet for an 85 in ancient history. How are you making out?
You know, the stationery I gave you looked swell in the box when I bought it, but now it doesn’t look good or like what it was worth. I’ll do better next time hence. I’m mad at myself, now, for buying it.
My sister Bea is going to give me a ‘Charm-curl Permanent’ in two more weeks. I can’t wait until I try it.
I have to write to a soldier now, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get his letter done as I’m tired as a dead dog. Bye now.
Love Ida
WEDS 27 – THURS 28 MAY TWINKLE, TWINKLE, LITTLE BAT
We flew back to London on Monday and went back to work the next day. We are discussing with the architect the rebuilding of our studio. It has been hotch-potched. But it’s best not to keep doing that and we should rebuild for a better working environment.
Thursday afternoon to our Conduit Street shop to an event organised and decorated by our clever visual merchandising manager, Lorraine. I am reading a passage from Alice in Wonderland. Of course I chose the famous scene, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. He murdered Time when he sang the song, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little bat’ – so said the Queen of Hearts – therefore their lives are stuck at six o’clock, which is tea time.
JUNE 2015
MON 8 – WEDS 10 JUNE DUSSELDORF
Andreas accompanied me to Dusseldorf where I’m to give a talk. I could choose any subject I liked and there is a fee. This is a regular event for speakers with ideas, sponsored and attended by German businessmen and also by the ticket-buying public. It was sold out. An audience of 2,000. Peter, whose marketing company arranged the event, looked after us so well and our schedule was comfortable. My talk was about the ‘Politicians R CRIMINALS’ campaign and at the word ‘CRIMINALS’ spontaneous clapping broke out. Very encouraging – helps me feel I’m on the right track – getting through.
I gave my fee to Cool Earth and at Peter’s suggestion we had hung their banners in the reception area. Matthew Owen (Cool Earth director) came, so afterwards I sat signing my biography and Matthew sat by my side giving out leaflets to those queuing and we raised another €12,000.
Dusseldorf is famous for its textiles, which now include industrial textiles like car-seat covers, and on the third day we were shown round a soon-to-be-opened textile museum. The machines are all operational and we watched them demonstrated. My mother was a weaver and she had twenty-four looms; she replaced the bobbins and tied the threads as they were about to run out, and whilst the machines were running, so that none stopped. During the demonstration the machines got faster and faster. Something scared me; it was that the smallest most simple innovation could unleash such power – at first just a bar of wood in the right place, then in a few more innovations; blinding thunder. I was scared by the machines because I am scared of the power of people.
The museum has an archive in the form of a basement room filled with thousands of bottles of vegetable dyes, each one a different colour; each needs its personal mordant to fix it and it will be thrilling to see one day the new colours applied. I expect most have never found a mordant. I once read a book called Mauve (by Simon Garfield). The colour mauve was the first synthetic dye, made from coal tar. It became a rage; it was the only fashionable colour for a time during the nineteenth century and women wore no other colour. It was one of the most important discoveries ever made because from this the synthetic industry grew synthetic fabrics and plastic and the whole perfume and pharmaceutical industry.
THURS 11 JUNE A TISCHBEIN PAINTING
Andreas is thinking of buying a little painting we both loved when we saw it. It’s late eighteenth-century by the painter Tischbein the Younger (1742–1808). It reminds me of Watteau because of its attitude. Watteau, born in 1684, died of TB aged thirty-six. He tells the truth in his paintings. You can find his work in the Wallace Collection. Two artists who copy him, Pater and Lancret, are there in the same room. Their paintings are decorative pieces but they don’t tell the truth – the gestures are self-conscious.
Andreas was telling me what he wanted to say about the painting and not listening to me.
‘Watteau was telling the truth!’ I said.
Andreas: ‘Yes, he probably invented the truth. You know when people die, they say the soul flies off, that little trembling of life.’ He fluttered his fingers near hi
s mouth and whisped out slightly his breath, referring to the little Tischbein. ‘You know, the dog licking his crotch and the other climbing up on her skirt, she with her hawk and the man behind the horses – he could be her servant – her lover?’
Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Younger’s ‘An Elegant Couple Out Hawking’.
What Andreas is describing is it’s so arbitrary – that’s what’s real.
FRI 12 JUNE TEDDY JOINS CR
Teddy has come to work for Climate Revolution. He, together with Cynthia and Cindy, makes up our team of three. Teddy is Andreas’s cousin. His name is Otmar Kronthaler. When his mother brought the new baby home and put him on the floor in his basket his fifteen-month-old brother toddled over, put his arms out and said ‘Teddy’.
SUN 14 JUNE BERNARD HAITINK
Andreas and I to the Barbican: Mozart Violin Concerto No. 3, Mahler Symphony No. 1 (‘Titan’); Bernard Haitink, conductor, and Alina Ibragimova, violin. Mahler really titanic. Haitink – I’ve had some of my most exciting times with the famous conductor and this was one of them. It is probably twenty years ago I remember stamping and whistling from the highest balcony at the end of Daphnis and Chloe. An orchestra is the high point of human achievement.
TUES 23 JUNE PRESTON VOTES AGAINST FRACKING
Got back from Milan (for our MAN show) last night. Now off to Preston to support the fantastic local campaign against fracking. It’s local but they also protest nationally and internationally. They are up to the hilt informed re the dangers of fracking. Tina Louise is one of the major spokespeople; she comes from Blackpool, near where Cuadrilla fracked then had to stop after they caused an earthquake.
I’m up here with Cynthia and Joe, who concentrates his activism on fracking. His team, Talk Fracking, have worked with Tina Louise before. Our CRIMINALS have no clue of the dangers of fracking or the immediate damage it would do to the economy. They are totally irresponsible, except to the GIANTS. They are pledged to the reflex action: ‘If it’s good for business, it’s good for everybody!’ (knee-jerk response from Vince Cable to John Hilary from War on Want).
I speak around the idea ‘Politicians R CRIMINALS’ and because of that my speech gets reported on mainstream media. If we keep calling them CRIMINALS we’ll get through.
Major WIN! The Preston council voted against fracking.
MON 29 JUNE VAL GARLAND
Val Garland, the make-up artist we love to work with, comes to our Battersea studio. She wants us to contribute to a film she is making about her art for students. She looks lovely wearing one of our dresses like a coat.
JULY 2015
WEDS 1 – THURS 2 JULY MEPHISTOPHELES
Wednesday: Andreas is off to Cataldi in Italy to work on Gold Label and to go to the beach on the weekend. I do an interview for Lorna for a film she is making re my activism. She wants me to talk about my childhood. I do another interview in a couple of weeks’ time and then she can keep putting everything together.
On Thursday I do a talk to camera for the internet on CRIMINAL. We will put up the film each Thursday and build the campaign one point at a time. For the ‘first’ talk I will ask people one thing: say CRIMINAL. Though people know politicians are criminals they focus on petty things – stuff like the expenses scandal, even though they feel it’s bigger than that. They know austerity’s a fiddle and many of us hate Tony Blair as a war criminal, a man who is responsible for deaths by the thousand and is free to deny it. I need to get it across that every one of their policies is a crime against humanity. TTIP gives absolute proof. Any politician who wishes to implement TTIP is a criminal because he is anti-people. I never thought politicians would have the gall to show their hand so obviously. But they did with TTIP. It’s like they are proud to be CRIMINALS. So now we know and we have to deal with them. They feel so safe playing their game of destruction, together with the Giants (monopolies) and backed by the Faceless Evil (Central Banks) and the American War Machine, and served by their PR – the mainstream media.
I have begun to see our global politics as a war game run by criminals who are going to wipe the board clean. The press is Mephistopheles (Joker) and we are Faust who put up no opposition. We sold our soul for consumption and we’re led along to Hell. I think it would be possible to rework Marlowe’s play.
Politicians must be able to tick four boxes to qualify. The rest (most of them) are CRIMINALS. They must be against fracking, against TTIP, pro community, pro human rights. We have already found two politicans: Caroline Lucas and Jeremy Corbyn. We need real politicians if we are going to save life on earth.
FRI 3 JULY LOVE TO JULIAN, MOST WANTED MAN IN THE WORLD
Julian’s birthday party. I wrote him a card which said ‘Love to Julian, the most wanted man in the world’. Andreas and I enjoyed talking to WikiLeaks workers from different parts of the world and to South American diplomats. We like the new Ecuadorian ambassador and his wife.
MON 13 JULY ANDY GOTTS FOR GREENPEACE
It’s taken a long time – six months – for photographer Andy Gotts to photograph sixty celebs all wearing the same T-shirt designed by Andreas for Greenpeace’s campaign (see p.276). The first to be photographed was George Clooney, the last Julian Assange.
I had thought: great to have all this on social media! What else can we do? A book? An exhibition? All wearing the same T-shirt? Even though a lot of them pull a powerful face. John Sauven, who heads Greenpeace UK, had the answer. What a brilliant idea! Take advantage of everybody wearing the same graphics – the London Underground escalator at Waterloo! That’s where Shell staff go up to work at the giant Shell building on the South Bank.
We all met for coffee before we went down to the escalator. John couldn’t be there – a hornet had bitten him and he was in hospital with antibiotics. The press were waiting and I went down with activists Sadie Frost and Leebo Freeman.
I was knocked out – the effect was tremendous. I had never looked at or even noticed adverts on the escalators before. Now, all wearing the same white shirt in the same framed format the portraits plunged down to Hell either side of the moving escalator, then streamed up to Heaven when you got to the bottom. It became a new space for art – an art exhibition experience. It’s there for two weeks. It’s an experience. One journalist who had interviewed Shell told me they said, ‘Oh, it’s just a one-off event with celebrities.’ I replied, ‘Wouldn’t they just like that support?’ Many more stars want to join in and have a photo. We just donated seventy more T-shirts because people want to do it in other countries.
Our Greenpeace Arctic campaign with celebrity photos by Andy Gotts.
TUES 14 JULY DINNER AT THE WALLACE COLLECTION
My friend, Bruno Wang, invited us to dinner at the Wallace Collection. We talked to Grayson Perry, all dolled up, a happy man. Andreas sat next to him and he confirmed to me Grayson’s reputation as a keen observer and thinker. We also talked to Zaha Hadid who looked stunning in frills of different browns because they toned with her brown skin; they fell from her like feathers and set off her eagle nose. She looked so beautiful, like a carving. I sat next to her architect partner, Patrick.
There was a lady on our table I felt friendly towards as she and her husband came from a family of English diplomats in China and I’m a big fan of her relation Maggie Keswick, whose book The Chinese Garden is one of my treasures. I think China up till the late nineteenth century was the greatest civilisation of all. Patrick thought the English lord of the nineteenth century was perhaps the upstanding specimen of civilisation. I said that after what Lord Elgin did to the Summer Palace in China I was not too sure. I claimed rather that France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, up until World War I, arrived at the peak of Western civilisation and that the salon – hosted typically by society women, e.g. Mme Strauss, the wife of a rich banker and friend of Proust – was the catalyst which made it happen. I am aware of all this because it was a special subject of my friend Gary.
I told the joke of Oscar Wilde who said that an
English lady opened a salon only to find she had opened a saloon. The lady I had been friendly to came back at me, ‘At least the English understand justice. Their law is superior to the French.’ I was flabbergasted. Where has she been the last hundred years? Her view might have been the jingoism of the past – but now! English law has been mined away, especially recently. Human rights! We’re back to before the Magna Carta because politicians are now making blanket laws which overule all previous law. I said, ‘Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers and I take that to mean the businessmen and the government which supports them would sell their grandmothers.’ That is true of Cameron, selling not only our financial assets but also disposing of our laws in exchange for favours from America. She came back at me again, ‘In a world of great and rising population it is wonderful that London is rapidly building so many high-rise flats.’ I buried my head in my hands – how can anybody think like that? I said the flats were for speculators and that they were pulling down the social housing. ‘Pah!’ – she pulled a face and waved me away. I said, ‘Exactly. Pah!’ and gave her the same face and gesture.
I am sure Lewis Carrol was thinking of Victorian society, especially the socialite dons, deans and their wives of Oxford (Alice’s family?), when he devised the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party – talking nonsense, riddles which left a hole in the air and time stopped forever at six o’clock tea time.
WEDS 15 JULY TALKING PUNK
Back to Lorna to finish my interview. She films in a room in the Groucho Club, which has nice light coming from the skylight. I balk at the need to discuss punk – but I managed. I hope that’s the end of it! Punk wasn’t important, just a marketing opportunity. I do love the look, though, and that’s really all it was – except that I learnt a lot from it. But to most people it was a marketing opportunity.
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