Charles Atlas is a New York–based artist who works in film, video, installation, and lighting design. He has been a pioneering figure in the creation of time-based works for more than five decades. His first museum survey in the United States, “Charles Atlas: About Time,” will open at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, on October 10, 2024, and run through March 16, 2025.
I am addicted to TikTok—I can get lost in the app for hours. I especially appreciate it as a contemporary platform that combines video and dance—media I have long been interested in. I sometimes imagine, with dread, the obsessiveness and repetition involved in the rehearsal process to achieve some of the more complicated group choreographies.
The artist, fetish photographer, and cartoonist born John Alexander Scott Coutts (his pseudonym, “John Willie,” is British slang for cock) was the publisher and editor of Bizarre, a kink magazine that ran between 1946 and ’56. It covered an array of topics, such as altocalciphilia, bondage, amputee fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism, corset training, and other forms of body modification. I was introduced to him by my friend Leigh Bowery, for whom he was a major source of inspiration.
This animated science-fiction TV show, created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, is about Rick Sanchez, a sociopathic, nihilistic scientist who drags his grandson, Morty Smith, on crazy misadventures across the interdimensional universe. The program runs the gamut, referencing everything from abstract theoretical physics to childish toilet humor. Brilliant!
She is a vocal terrorist, a force of nature noted for her wailing, nearly eight-octave range. As an avant-garde musician, singer-songwriter, and visual artist, she has been committed in her work to addressing issues such as AIDS, mental illness, political injustice, fascist historical revisionism, and crimes against humanity.
This tiny Manhattan lunch counter has two locations: 740 Broadway and 203 West Fourteenth Street (in my neighborhood). The shops are open 24/7 and sell a wide variety of their namesake treats. During the 1980s and ’90s, this was one of my go-to spots at 5 AM after dancing all night at the Pyramid Club or Jackie 60. I lament the Pub’s current prices, which have gone way up with inflation.
This Chinese trilogy of sci-fi works written by Cixin Liu details humanity’s discovery of and preparation for an alien invasion. Liu’s epic begins with the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and finishes with the annihilation of the universe. Mind-expanding and awe-inspiring.
Taylor was an actor and comedian who worked in nightclubs and on TV. He was famous for his exuberant and flamboyant personality, which he zhoosed up even further with a wild mustache and an assortment of intentionally lousy toupees. He had a habit of showering himself (and others) with confetti. He epitomized low humor at its most entertaining.
The ninety-three-year-old British polymath is a mathematician, a mathematical physicist, and a philosopher of science who received a Nobel Laureate in Physics in 2020. Penrose has contributed to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology, among other fields. He is also the inventor of several graphic devices, including the Penrose Triangle, a type of optical illusion or impossible figure. Although he has written many popular books that have sparked my interest in science, I still only have an inkling regarding the fundamental concepts he discusses.
Engman is a photographer, artist, and director who lives in Brooklyn. His work pushes the limits of traditional imagemaking, and he’s a leader in the realm of AI-generated art. He also made his mother the subject of a group of theatrical, provocative photographs—in which she frequently appears nude—collected for a book published in 2020, simply titled MOM.
She is the sophisticated sister of red. Orange is the color of the second chakra—that’s the sex chakra. I collect and wear almost anything orange.
