The art that inspires

All my opinions on movies, TV, music, comics and art in general are as subjective as everybody else's, but one way I judge the relative merits of my entertainments is by finding out how personally inspiring they are - that they're such good pieces of art that they want me to go make my own.

The Velvet Underground were famously the band that only a few thousand people really listened to, but every single one of them went out and formed their own bands afterwards. I didn't get quite the same drive from the first night when I heard All Tomorrow's Parties, (although I instantly knew I would never do anything in my life that would be as delicate and beautiful as Pale Blue Eyes), but I have felt it in plenty of other places, and especially in my comics. 

It's no coincidence that the most prolific I ever was at writing fiction was in the 90s, when I wrote a disturbing amount of movie screenplays that had absolutely no chance of ever getting made, and when I was deep in my fan fiction days - pumping out thousands of fairly useless words a month for J Street adventures on the Never Ending Board at comicbookresources.com - and this was also when I was getting new issues of The Invisibles every month. 

Every issue of Grant Morrison's opus was a delight, I fell deeply for it all, and every time I finished a new issue, I just really wanted to do my own, and would write mountains of extraordinarily dorky copy. If I ever started to flag, I just read the Flex Mentallo mini series again, and would get going again. 

I was also hugely inspired by the Doctor Who New Adventures in the 90s, especially the more modern takes from happily enthusiastic amateurs, and the new books from the likes of Cornell, Orman, Miles and Parkin fuelled the fire.

Some authors inspire me in different ways - Kim Newman books make me want to write stories where everybody teams up with everyone to defeat everything, and James Ellroy books make me want to cut back on all the unnecessary words in my writing, and then go even further. 

Reading something great from a talented writer makes you want to write your own view of the world. It's just the way things work.

It comes through in all media, the vast soundscapes of Richard Wright's keyboards on Pink Floyd songs want me to sail into the infinite, and seeing Van Gogh at in the flesh makes me want to look at the world differently. 

In the world of cinema, all my favourite films make me want to go out and make movies, despite a severe lack of opportunities and a gross over-confidence in my own abilities. I still want to make something great when I see a Kubrick of a Coen Brothers film. Sergio Leone films always fire me up, and Morricone music will be playing while I'm writing anything for the next month, and the exact same thing used to happen when a new David Lynch came out, and I would go full Badalamenti for a month.

The single most inspiring piece of work was probably Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice, which I saw on a trip to the US and was deeply inspired by, especially by Belladonna's haircut, and had an idea for a novel that I actually went and wrote. It took five years, but the premise, late twist and ending where all figured out before the end credits of that film rolled in early 2015.

I've been stuck halfway through the sequel to that story for a couple of years now, I really need to do a PTA binge to get things going again. Some of the old favourites still get those sickly-sweet creative juices flowing, and there is always something new to show the way.