I found something kind of interesting: a "Top 100 things" list made by Matt Groening probably around the time of the height of the Simpsons popularity. It's a sidebar. It's an interesting mix of counterculture staples that are really great (Joseph Heller!), popular culture, comics from the eighties that seemed good at the time but probably don't hold up, and esoterica from around the world- Satiyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, beloved by my friend Joel Brazzel, comes in right behind The Catcher In The Rye.

Also, yesterday I watched the Half Japanese documentary that Jeff Feuerzeig made 10 years before he made The Devil And Daniel Johnston. In the footage of the recording of a cover of "I Heard Her Call My Name" with Mo Tucker playing the drums, one of the other not-a-Fair-brother members is wearing one of those bootleg Black Bart Simpson T-shirts that I now associate with Andrew Jeffrey Wright. On this shirt, Black Bart Simpson is chasing after Black Betty Boop. One of the more famous Half-Japanese photos involves Jad Fair wearing a Destroy All Monsters t-shirt. Destroy All Monsters is a thing I think of as being a forerunner of the Fort Thunder movement which Andrew Jeffrey Wright was on the periphery of. The guy from Half-Japanese is wearing the shirt not as a reference to AJW, rather those Black Bart Simpson shirts were just a thing in the culture at the time, whereas now they're more of an element to be collaged or whatever. The Destroy All Monsters book, Geisha This, is currently available at the Picturebox site, and I very much want to buy it, but do not have the money this Christmas season. It's got a flexi-disc, when Picturebox was making the Black Dice book they wanted to put in a flexi-disc but there's only one manufacturer these days and its prohibitively expensive. Geisha This was made in 1995, one year after the Half-Japanese documentary, and probably two years after Matt Groening made his list of the best things.

Later that day, when rereading comics, I discovered that the artist Rita Ackermann (high-profile work includes the cover art to the Thurston Moore album Psychic Hearts, and an interview in the last ANP Quarterly, where I learned she's friends with Gang Gang Dance) appears in Paul Pope's science fiction comic Heavy Liquid, as an old woman, because the comic is set in the future. Paul Pope also wrote and drew Presidential candidate Ron Paul's favorite Batman comic, which I bought for a quarter a few years ago, in an example of capitalism not working.