Ten People Who Inspire Me, Part 2

So, this actually started out as one post, but loquaciousness won the day, so now you're getting a gander at a two-part post!

6. Grant Morrison- Hm, just like I started out last post with a British comic book author, so too with this one. It's kind of interesting, how so many of my favorite authors manage to be British. I mean, I'm really not an Anglophile. I only have a few British friends, I don't see much merit in Monty Python, and though I love the Beatles, I am of the realization that they aren't deities (*gasp*).

But what inspires me so much about Grant Morrison is his imagination. Whereas Alan Moore is so cool for the way he humanizes super heroes, Grant Morrison really takes these spandex-clad heroes to a whole new level of imagination.

For instance, there's this group of super heroes called Doom Patrol, who were supposed to be, "The World's Weirdest Superhero Team." But in the 80's, they were a bunch of angsty teens led by an old bald guy in a wheel chair. As you can tell, the X-Men had exerted something of an influence (though to be fair, the bald guy had been there all along.) Well, whereas most comic book writers would look at an assignment and either say, "Yipee! I've always wanted to write an X-Men rip-off!) or, "Amsterdammit, how am I gonna be original with this?" Grant Morrison saw the title "World's Weirdest Superhero Team," and drove the whole book in a completely different direction. Killing off half the cast, he inserted some of his own characters, like Crazy Jane, who had 64 super powers to match each of her 64 personalities. The book was a smash success.

Simply put, he looks at what makes super heroes tick, but instead of deconstructing them and sending them crashing down to earth, he takes those absurdities and exults them, celebrating them.

7. Walter Gibson- Well, this one was a tough one for me. You see, Walter Gibson was the 30's author of many of the old Shadow pulp novels. Essentially, twice a month he wrote a novel about a double-gunned avenger of justice, who used the help of his many cohorts to stop crime. So he was essentially writing 70,000 words EVERY OTHER WEEK, which I imagine as being bloody difficult.

Of course, his novels were mostly crud. I don't want to step on the guy or anything, but the stories are pretty one-dimensional. The character of The Shadow is infuriating. He's not characterized all that much, but is instead shown cackling all over the place, telling his followers what to do, and occasionally shooting people. I can deal with the fact that that sounds more like a villain's job than a hero's, but frankly the villains were the only interesting parts of the story. They tended to have all of these quirks and personality quirks. But when it came to the actual protagonist, the characterization was terrible.

So why the heck am I putting him as one of the ten people who inspire me most? Well, to be completely honest, quantity beat quality in my eyes, with him. To this very day it shocks me that someone could write so many words in such a short period of time. And it really opens my eyes to the fact that not all literature is about crafting the perfect sentence or dazzling people with witty plot twists. Sometimes, it's just about simple entertainment, or even just simple communication. And that's pretty cool.

8. Jack Kerouac- Truman Capote said, in regards to Jack Kerouac's works, "That's not writing, that's typing." Well I've actually gotta disagree with him on that one. Walter Gibson? That's just typing. Jack Kerouac? That's just genius.

He's probably most remembered for his crazy prose style, his road trips, and his hedonistic life styles, but there's so much more to him than that. There really are two poles to his personality, with the one side being the crazy, drinking, partying side, but there's also the quieter, more melancholic side. Sometimes, he has these philosophical thoughts which are so amazing when juxtaposed with his more hedonistic exterior. I feel like he's such a deep person and that's why I've loved all the books of his that I've read. I feel like I'm not explaining this well, so I'll throw up a quote of his:

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost."

9. Clint Eastwood- OK, this probably seems like another strange choice, because I'm not exactly running around with a Magnum .44, asking criminals if they're feeling lucky. I'm not a cowboy and I most certainly have a name. So why did I choose him?

Well, I honestly respect Clint as an actor. He's not exactly a character actor and he only plays one or two sorts of characters over and over again, but that's alright, because what he does do, he's very good at. And that's all that really matters. I know actors think it's so important to play a variety of roles, but why is that? If you find one roll you're good at, why not stick to it? I guess this slot just as easily could have been filled by Jack Nicholson or Alec Baldwin, but quite frankly there was this massive Dirty Harry marathon on AMC not too long ago and it just validated in my mind the awesomeness of Clint.

10. Aaron Sorkin- Strangely enough there's a small link between Aaron Sorkin's inspiration and Craig Ferguson's. Essentially, I love conversation, and as far as conversational writers go, Aaron Sorkin's the best. He's probably most well-known for West Wing, or maybe the Social Network. But either way, I just love the words he puts into people's mouths.

I think I wish I could speak like I was in something Aaron Sorkin had written. I wish all my conversations were super-fast, involving me walking from room to room, looking like I had something important to do, while arguing whether or not abortion should be legal, or something.

So that's it. Those are the ten people who I think inspire me the most. Those are the ten people you can blame for what you see before you.

Ten People Who Inspire me the Most, but in No Particular Order, 'cause That'd be Too Hard, Part 1

I figured I might need some inspiration for this crazy didleedoo blogathon thing I'm doing, so why not make a list of the ten people who inspire me the most?

1. Alan Moore- I. Love. Alan. Moore. It's kind of a problem, really. But what can I say? The guy knows how to form a sentence AND he's the master of creating really friggin' cool ideas. Everyone knows Watchmen was amazing, because it took these two-dimensional Charlton comics characters and made them so human. It took the man twelve months to completely change our views on the caped crusaders.

But he's done so much more than that. Another great example of his work is League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he took characters from all these different literary periods and smooshed them into one massive, eon-spanning universe. Honestly, reading that as a sophomore in high school completely changed my views on literature in general. I really got into that idea of the "Great Conversation," or that idea that the great works of literature are connected, and thus in a way they're almost communicating with each other.

And he's a good enough writer, even when he's not shifting your paradigm to a completely new level. Like in Top Ten, he told a Hill Street Blues-esque police procedural story WHERE EVERYONE HAD SUPER POWERS. It was pretty cool and a lot of fun, and showed that he's a good-enough writer that sometimes, he can just entertain.

2. Frank Sinatra- What can I say? In regards to my music tastes, a lot of the oldies really are goodies. Somehow, the guy managed to smoke, yet still be able to belt out of powerful song. Better yet, he pretty much sang from the 40's into the 90's, and for most of the time successfully. As opposed to many singers, he adapted to the times, and I can really respect that.

As if that wasn't enough, what really got him on the list was the fact that he was also an actor, who acted in quite a few films (around 50, according to Netflix). And he wasn't just some two-bit actor who got his foot in the door because of his singing. He was actually a really good actor. And it's kind of astonishing that someone can have such a big career in films, yet still be remembered mainly for his singing. And he was in my favorite film, Manchurian Candidate! Need I say more? Didn't think so.

3. Satoshi Kon- This one probably seems a little bit like out of left field, but I actually like anime quite a lot. I don't know why, but there seems to be something so surreal about the genre, that can't be found elsewhere. Every time I dip my toes into an anime (and I mean the 12-26 episode gems. I'm not talking about those ba-jillion episode anime, which might be good, but still can't beat things like Paranoia Agent, Cowboy Bebop, or Baccano!), I find this completely new experience that I wasn't quite expecting. And quite often, that experience changes my view of the world, ever so slightly.

As you might have surmised, Satoshi Kon is the master of this perspective-shifting. Director of the anime series Paranoia Agent, and films like Perfect Blue, Paprika, and such, anything he's done is such a trip. Yet at the same time, he's simply using the medium to tell a story he likes, in a way that's strangely personal to him. He takes the tools he has and does things completely unexpected with them, simply because that's who he is. And that's something I can respect.

4. Craig Ferguson-I love talking. It's really quite fun to do, when you get right down to it. The exchange of words and information from one person to another, sometimes meant to educate, sometimes meant to entertain, and quite often simply meant to pass time is an amazing thing to behold and even more fun to take part in.

And there's just something so beautiful about the way this old Scottish talk show host does it. Every time he comes on at, like, 12:30, he does so with a certain irreverent bombast. He basically looks and the world and says, "Aw, screw it. I'm not here to be nice and warm and fuzzy. I'm here to make some fun penis jokes, and keep you up for as long as possible." Yet for all he tries to convince us that he doesn't really care about people, he really does pay attention, and you can tell in his interviews that he's trying his best to keep all his guests comfortable.

Well, perhaps comfortable isn't the right word, given the fact that he's so prone to telling his guests he's going to start and awkward pause and he does just that. But I guess he always makes sure that his guests are having fun. He cares about people while making them laugh. In my day-to-day life, I think I've always striven to do that.

5. Ray Bradbury- Oh, Ray. I don't even know where to begin with you. You're probably most famous for warning people against the perils of television in your seminal work, Fahrenheit 451, yet one of my favorite things to do is watch vintage television (or Craig Ferguson), so how can I say you've inspired me? Well, suffice it to say it's a pretty complex relationship.

I started out reading Fahrenheit 451 in 7th grade. Didn't like it much. It was too depressing for me back then, with all its dystopian vibes and the belief that an individual couldn't change society until society was ready to change. But then I had to read it for school in my Sophomore year and it was another one of those books that completely changed the way I looked at things. Suddenly, I realized that maybe the Internet was shortening my attention span, just like Bradbury had warned television might. But that didn't really change things too much (as can be evinced by this little blog post right here). Instead, what really impacted me was the way he weaved sentences, and the way he created such depressingly relatable characters. He told some dang good stories and he told them well. And that was good enough for me.

NEXT: Part 2 of People Who Inspire me!