The Annex, June 2011

   

Rhymes with funny

Last weekend, I met a couple of friends for drinks downtown and they mentioned twunnytwunny.com. The subject of our discussion wasn't the photos, though, but rather the title I had chosen for my blog. Both of them pronounced it "twoonie twoonie" (rhymes with "toonie") and asked what the hell it meant. It never occurred to me that someone might pronounce it any way other than how it was spelled (rhymes with "funny," "sunny," "bunny," etc.), otherwise it wouldn't make sense. Maybe I think about these things too much, but to my mind it seemed perfectly obvious. "Twunnytwunny" is a phonetic rendering of "20/20," the score for having perfect vision in both eyes. There's a familiar saying, "Hindsight is always 20/20," meaning that it's easier to see the source of our errors in retrospect. Which is why I chose the tag line "What is it they say about hindsight?" I guess I figured that if anyone didn't understand the meaning of "twunnytwunny" at first glance, they'd surely get it on closer inspection. My mistake. Maybe I should just change the tag line to "Rhymes with funny" and leave it at that.

My Toronto II

My Toronto I

Chinatown

My Toronto

Back to Berlin?

Scorned by almost everyone, Berlin's notorious Wall became the perfect canvas for West German graffiti artists

My affinity for Berlin began in the summer of 1981, when I first read Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin.” The story, written in 1939, inspired the classic 1972 film “Cabaret,” starring Liza Minnelli and Michael York. I decided to see Berlin for myself, a fabled city made all the more famous by The Wall during the Cold War. I spent most of January 1986 in Berlin. By sheer coincidence, Isherwood died on Jan. 6 that year. He had lived in California since the Second World War, but still had fans in Germany. One day, by another bizarre coincidence, I stumbled across the apartment block where he resided in the 1930s: there was a brass plaque inscribed with his name by the front door, and someone had placed a wreath and candles on the sidewalk beneath it. But I didn’t realize that he had died until I got back to the flat that evening and heard the news on the BBC.

Another highlight was taking the Berlin U-Bahn (subway) to the Friedrichstrasse Station, where Cold War tensions were not only highly visible but also deeply palpable. In the divided city, subway trains crossed into East German territory while travelling from one part of West Berlin to another. I'll never forget the so-called "Geisterbahnhöfe" (ghost stations) where no trains ever stopped. Illuminated by flickering fluorescent lights, the stations were off limits to everyone except East German custodians, who kept them meticulously clean, and armed guards.The billboards looked like they hadn't been changed since 1961, the year the Wall went up. Passengers could change trains only at Friedrichstrasse, a border checkpoint where officials went to great lengths to prevent East Berliners from escaping. At random intervals, German shepherd dogs would be released onto the tracks, allowed to run beneath the entire length of idling trains to sniff out desperate passengers clinging to the undercarriage.

I haven't been back to Berlin for 25 years, and needless to say the city has changed a lot since then. A return visit is long overdue.