Alex North

Alex North (December 4, 1910 – September 8, 1991) was an American composer best known for his many film scores, including A Streetcar Named Desire (one of the first jazz-based film scores), Viva Zapata!, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. He was the first composer to receive an Honorary Academy Award.

Early life

North was born Isadore Soifer in Chester, Pennsylvania to Russian Jewish parents.

Career

North managed to integrate his modernism into typical film music leitmotif structure, rich with themes. One of these became the famous song, "Unchained Melody". Nominated for fifteen Oscars but unsuccessful each time, North is one of only two film composers to receive the Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, the other being Ennio Morricone. North's frequent collaborator as orchestrator was the avant-garde composer Henry Brant. He won the 1968 Golden Globe award for his music to The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968).

His best-known film scores include A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Viva Zapata!, The Rainmaker, Spartacus, The Misfits, Cleopatra, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Dragonslayer and Under the Volcano. His music for The Wonderful Country makes use of Mexican and American motifs.

Alex Honnold

Alex J. Honnold (born August 17, 1985) is an American rock climber best known for his free solo ascents of big walls. He has broken a number of speed records, most notably the only known solo climb (mostly free climbing with a few points of aid) of the Yosemite Triple crown, an 18-hour 50 minute link up of Mount Watkins, The Nose, and the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome. He and Hans Florine are the current record holders for the Nose with a climb time of 2:23:51. Honnold says that he likes tall, long routes and that he tries to do them quickly. He is the author of Alone on the Wall, a collaboration with David Roberts that details his climbing exploits.

Biography

Honnold was born in Sacramento, California. He started climbing when he was 11 years old. Upon graduating from the Mira Loma High School with a 4.7 GPA, he matriculated to the University of California Berkeley to study engineering. However, at the age of 19, he dropped out of school and has since devoted all his time to climbing. Between climbs, he runs or hikes to maintain fitness. Honnold lives out of his van, spending less than a thousand dollars per month, enabling him to follow the weather and climb all the time. Honnold prefers big walls and sport climbing, but enjoys any climb calling for extreme commitment, Yosemite being his favorite area because of its impressive walls and favorable weather. Honnold is inspired by such noted climbers as Peter Croft, John Bachar and Tommy Caldwell, and even more so by the stark simplicity and beauty of El Capitan.

Alex

Alex is a common name used in multiple languages. In English, it is usually a diminutive of the male given name Alexander, or its female equivalent Alexandra or Alexandria. Aleck or Alec is the Scottish form of Alex. The East European male name Alexey (Aleksei, Alexis, Aleksa) is also sometimes shortened to Alex. It is a commonly used nickname in Spanish for Alejandro, Alexandro, Alejandrino and Alexandrino, and related names like Alexa and Alexis.

People whose first name is Alex

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey is a science-fiction narrative, produced in 1968 as both a novel, written by Arthur C. Clarke, and a film, directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is a part of Clarke's Space Odyssey series. Both the novel and the film are partially based on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel", written in 1948 as an entry in a BBC short story competition, and "Encounter in the Dawn", published in 1953 in the magazine Amazing Stories.

Resources

After deciding on Clarke's 1948 short story "The Sentinel" as the starting point, and with the themes of man's relationship with the universe in mind, Clarke sold Kubrick five more of his stories to use as background materials for the film. These included "Breaking Strain", "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting...", "Who's There?", "Into the Comet", and "Before Eden". Additionally, important elements from two more Clarke stories, "Encounter at Dawn" and (to a somewhat lesser extent) "Rescue Party", made their way into the finished project. One other element (crossing vacuum without an intact pressure suit) is from the short story "Take a Deep Breath".

Space Odyssey

The Space Odyssey series is a series of science fiction novels by the writer Arthur C. Clarke. Two of the novels have been made into feature films, released in 1968 and 1984 respectively. Two of Clarke's early short stories may also be considered part of the series.

Short stories:

Novels/Films:

The 2001 screenplay was written by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick jointly, based on the seed idea in "The Sentinel" that an alien civilization has left an object on the Moon to alert them to mankind's attainment of space travel. In addition, the 1953 short story "Encounter in the Dawn" contains elements of the first section of the film, in which the ancestors of humans are apparently given an evolutionary "nudge" by extraterrestrials. The opening part of another Clarke story, "Transience", has plot elements set in about the same time in human history, but is otherwise unrelated.