to move up and down
Taliban alarm clock: My first day back in Afghanistan and the Taliban take out the pizza place
I was so tired my first night at Kandahar Air Field (KAF) that the wailing-screaming-shreaking-shouting rocket attack siren was easily incorporated into my dream. It was a good ten minutes later and someone banging on my door to tell me to get my ass in the bunker that finally got me out of my borrowed bed.
I had memorized the location of the bunker but it took me a few strides in the wrong direction before I remembered where it was. I joined the two other occupants at the doorway. It was 5.30 a.m.
An MP truck drove by a nearby bunker and warned people to get inside and not stand in the doorway. We all backed in.
The alarm was not a ruse. We heard at least two impacts and could see dust from the explosion across the rooftops of the base. I was told that with the end of the holy month of Ramadan at midnight last night, the Taliban had gotten themselves filled with food and decided to stir things up a little.
The National Post’s Richard Johnson begins his third journey to Afghanistan this week. Work from his earlier assignments won international awards and a place in the Smithsonian Museum’s permanent collection.
Follow his work here nationalpost.com/kandaharjournal
On Twitter at @newsillustrator
Or see more of his work here at newsillustrator.com
Or contact Richard in the field at kandaharartist@gmail.com
Leonard Cohen: Portrait of the artist as an older man
Leonard Cohen is releasing his 12th album, Old Ideas, on Jan. 31. Born in Montreal, Cohen learned guitar and formed his first band while a student at McGill, but the musician has always been more than just an everyday rock star. He’s a prophet, a poet, a sex symbol, an observant Jew who practices Zen, a businessman who lost his fortune, a muse and, perhaps most importantly, a father. The Post’s Ben Kaplan assembled a panel to dissect the various parts of the 77-year-old icon. (Illustration by Steve Murray)
Q&A: David Hockney on canvassing for new ideas
For 50 years, British artist David Hockney has crafted vibrant, influential pictures out of everything from Polaroid photographs to Xerox photocopies. Now, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is showcasing Hockney’s latest technical foray: sketches on the iPhone and iPad. With only a few weeks left to go before the groundbreaking exhibition leaves Toronto, the 74-year-old tells Leah Sandals what those shiny new technologies can (and can’t) do for art.
Seth: The modern Canadian cartoonist
“There’s some real truth to the idea that it gives me the opportunity to do stuff that I would like to do but never will,” Seth explains, sitting rigidly in a hotel chair, wearing a three-piece wool suit like armour against a world he’s still not entirely comfortable with.
In a league of his own: The extraordinary gentleman that is writer Alan Moore
An admirer of Alan Moore has called him “the Orson Welles of comics” and the undisputed high priest of his craft. That’s not the only extravagant praise this remarkable English author has inspired. When Moore writes storylines for comic books he does it in a way that excites a passionate international fan club. People write books about him, blog about him, imitate him and idolize him.
Moore’s stories often deal with normal comic fare, such as superheroes and global conspiracies, but he brings to these familiar themes an abrasive anger and a densely complicated morality. The series called Watchmen, for instance, seems to be partly about a vigilante named Rorschach (he wears an ink blot mask) who fights evil with an ethical sense that’s not entirely clear. Mark D. White, the New York professor who edited a recent academic book, Watchmen and Philosophy, views Moore’s writing as “an embarrassment of riches to the comics-obsessed philosopher.”
Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2011 Questionaires
On May 7 and 8, an eclectic roster of cartoonists, writers, illustrators, and artists will take over the Toronto Reference Library for the 2011 edition of the beloved Toronto Comic Arts Festival. For the past two years, the National Post has previewed TCAF by running dozens of Q&As with some of the talent attending the festival; this year, we wanted to spotlight those exhibiting at the festival for the very first time. What took them so long?
His friends as fiends: Otto Dix’s grotesque portraits of loved ones reflect the difficulty of readjusting to life after the First World War. Rouge Cabaret continues to Jan. 2 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art
