"This is a curious little book I picked up while I was working at the Neuegalerie in New York, a very formative period in my life. It was published in the early 1900s, and chronicles the author’s attempt at making a perpetual motion machine. Part musings, part diary entries, it’s a trial and error novella about the author attempting to devise a perpetual motion machine and how that obsession illuminates the problems in his real life. It’s a story that’s riddled with failure, but stubbornly optimistic in a way I can relate to."

"The first novel that messed me up. I’ve read it so many times—first in my late teens, when I was in my full horror fan mode. In Ireland, where I lived, there was no such thing as a streetlight, so you looked outside and your own imagination would decide what was there. But there was something about the descriptions of the Bramford, the apartment that Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse move into, that was my first descriptive explanation of New York living. Way before I saw the movie, the story leapt off the page."

"I grew up with this album, and I remember being really sensitive to the different musical styles. It's quite a New York album, as well—all the different styles melting into one city. This is a really witty album. There's a true masterpiece in it, "Real Men," which was queer before it was a huge subject of conversation, quite gender-bending—questioning this idea of being a man and what that means. Musically, it's really rich, and very frilly as well: lots of long songs with improvisation. It's an interesting and empowering album."

"This is fiction, but it impressed the hell out of me even though I very rarely have time to read fiction these days. It is the New York Times book review “Notable Book of The Year,” as well. It gives the account of Germans who fought Nazism and were killed or put in jail for life by Nazis for it. A German citizen is killed just for dropping cards all over the city writing his objection of Hitler’s policies. His wife was also sentenced to death, and was in jail indefinitely"

"I really loved The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. I remember hearing that Stephanie Mills, who played the part of Dorothy on Broadway, wound up not getting the part. They had to change a lot of the details for the story to make sense for Diana Ross — that’s what got me interested to go see it. And then to see Michael and all the other stars in it. It was also really amazing how they transformed New York City into the fantasy world of an urban Oz."

"Do I have to say anything? I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t love this film. There’s a reason it ran for over a year in one theater near me growing up in New York (as well as a reason its distributors tried to dump it, since it was so resolutely odd and unique . . . and wonderful). Having Bud Cort do a cameo in my first feature was a private dream come true. A film to live by, this affected and inspired me as much as a person as as a filmmaker."

"When I became a film academic in the 1980s, I was allocated a class through which I discovered silent (or rather non-sync-sound) films. I had never appreciated the extraordinary beauty of this cinema and, most of all, I loved films of the very late twenties, made on the cusp of the transition—for instance, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld and The Docks of New York. People on Sunday is an amazing film document of Berlin just before the Nazis came to power, and is also a “young modern woman” film."

"In the early ’80s, Seidelman made two of the coolest movies ever made back-to-back. First came this urgent, spiky punk-rock fable—with its striving outsiders and crazy rhythms—and then the great Desperately Seeking Susan. Both present a vision of Manhattan as a broken, semi-lawless amusement park in deep decline—a version of New York City that was long gone by the time I arrived there in 1999. Watching Smithereens is like being teleported to a far-off planet that’s about to be colonized."