Niklas's thoughts

I love Jackass. Most of the contents. There's no real negativity in the series. There's pranks, stuff that would usually be embarrassing, many gut-laughs, a lot of pain.

Steve-O is a Jackass cast member, well-known for performing some of the more painful and stunts that would be embarrassing to most people. I'm reading his first memoir, Professional Idiot: a Memoir. His dad was an absent and careless extremely-high-up executive at Pepsico; Steve-O's mom was a stay-at-home alcoholic.

One of the more interesting things about Steve-O is that he's a classic twelve-step alcoholic: he's a person who's made his way through the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program.

I think that the charm of Jackass is in us being able to not take ourselves too seriously. You can't be super-macho in Jackass: you have to embrace the fact that you look uncool. That ability to not take ourselves seriously and be OK in compromising situations, I think, is endearing. —Steve-O

There's a lot of immediate shit about Jackass that puts it aside to a lot of pop-culture events. It's naturally not only about laughter, fear, and pain; it's about friendship and love. It's easy to see that those guys like and even love each other. In a larger perspective, Jackass is a story about what happens when regular people become world-famous. Drugs, alcohol, sex, addiction, money, jealousy, hate, falling to pieces, trying to pick oneself up.

It just so happened that Johnny Knoxville and some of the people in our Jackass world staged an intervention: they locked me up in a psychiatric ward, and I was locked up long enough and exposed to the right kind of message that I realised, 'Wow, I have to do something.' I've been sober ever since. —Steve-O

One of the more wonderful things about Steve-O is that he's fairly erudite about life, like a lot of other AA peeps; you get to know what's truly valuable in life when everything you 'valued' is bullshit, when your 'friends' are really parasites and vultures or buried deep in addiction, like yourself. Getting your head out of that instead of trying to find out what barbecue coal to buy is real.

Before Twitter collapsed completely (due to Elon Musk being forced to buy the platform, something he didn't want to do, I was lucky to be allowed to reproduce an email that was sent by David Berman, the musician and writer, to a guy who asked him for advice on sobriety. I love that letter.

#alcoholism #addiction #Jackass #SteveO #fun #sobriety

Jocelyn West was previously named Jocelyn Montgomery. She is one of the founding members of the wondrous band Miranda Sex Garden.

West's song on this album is wonderful. It floats, it builds, it takes great care of Hildegard von Bingen's work and legacy. David Lynch's work is also evident, making the voice float and carry through. That said, I'm not sure how much work Lynch did on the album.

From Lynchnet:

In 1998, David Lynch completed work on a new album by Jocelyn Montgomery, the Scottish fiddle player seen in Pretty as a Picture. The album is based on 12th century verses by Hildegard von Bingen. The album was released in the US on August 25, 1998.

Jocelyn Montgomery: The experiences I've had singing Hildegard and performing it, is that it's always been a very natural and instinctive thing. I've always deeply identified with it. It's the most beautiful music I've ever come across ... ever sung.

#MusicTips #music #JocelynMontgomery #DavidLynch #JocelynWest

From the Bandcamp page:

ABADIR, known to his friends as Rami Abadir, is a music producer, sound designer, DJ and music critic born in Cairo, Egypt and based in Berlin, Germany.

When I started listening to this EP, I thought Omar Souleyman had a child with Zuli.

This is Egypt, jungle, and intense percussive movements. I dig this stuff.

#music #MusicTips #Egypt #ABADIR #OmarSouleyman #Zuli

This is one of the most weird metal-music releases I've heard in 2026. Here's what I wrote on Record Club after I heard the EP:

Vocals seem to be by that little guy who's chained to Jabba the Hutt.

The synths and piano breaks do my little head in.

Imagine Elton John collabing with Darkthrone.

#metal #music #MusicTips

This is a list of books that David Berman, the poet, musician, composer, front person of Silver Jews, and wondrous blogger, mentioned as somehow influential on him. If you visit the list on Bookwyrm, you'll see a note with every book that contains a short quote or just a reference to where and when Berman mentioned the book.

#books #reading #list #DavidBerman

The song 'This Train Don’t Stop There Anymore' would not be the shit if it weren't for its three components:

• the music (written by Elton John)
• the lyrics (written by Bernie Taupin)
• the video (directed by David LaChapelle)

The video stars Justin Timberlake as Elton John during the height of John's 1970s popularity. LaChapelle cast Paul Reubens (best known as Pee-Wee Herman) as John Reid, who was John's manager for 25 years.

I love the lyrics paired with the video; everything's sad. And the video is beautiful in its slow-mo wonders.

Side notes: Gary 'Take That' Barlow sings backing vocals on this track. The track's been covered by Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris:

#music #MusicTips #EltonJohn #BernieTaupin #DavidLachapelle #PaulReubens #video

James Blake posted this a while back.

It's not a trip into negativity; for me, at least, this is a reminder to remember the art, the work, the fun, not the metrics nor the bullshit behind all of it.

Unfortunately, for professional artists, they do need to keep their ear to the grindstone.

While Christie's are auctioning away 'approximately 80 guitars' that Johnny Marr owns, people like Jon Spencer have to grind.

In this podcast episode, Spencer speaks about his latest album, how he runs his own record label, and how he books every single gig. He actually did that most of the time while in Boss Hog, Heavy Trash, and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. That's saying something. Also, that's what Johnny Marr and Morrissey (and Morrissey's mum, if I'm not mistaken) did during their heyday.

Run your own record label and handle your own affairs: complete control and extremely taxing.

Let a record label handle your shit, unless it's a very good record label: get fucking swindled and dumped at the side of the road after your first album.

When you see something like this, you know music's for real. The people are for real. And the world is on fire.

#music #MusicTips #JonSpencer #JamesBlake #MusicBusiness #BrokenRecord

Andreas Cervenka is my favourite economy journalist. He's written books. I've written about his Greedy Sweden. Another one of his books is named 'What does a bank do?' (my translation of the original title in Swedish).

That's actually a great example of Cervenka's greatness. Just like Noam Chomsky, Cervenka is brilliant at simply explaining complex and complicated subjects.

For example, he taught me that if I get a hold of 25 million USD, I can get a license to start my own bank. Once I do that in Sweden, I can start creating my own money.

Yes, you read that correctly.

You can create your own money. And that's not only how banks work in Sweden. The basic scheme is the same all over the world.

But that's not the only way to make money.

Cervenka recently had an article published in Aftonbladet magazine: Är SpaceX peak crazy?. In short, I think most of the article spells two things:

1. How money easily is valued in very illusory ways
2. The coming burst of the AI bubble will make the global financial crisis of 2008 to seem like a case of the sniffles (in some ways)

OK, here come quotes, translated by yours truly:

Friday afternoon, Swedish time, the space company SpaceX makes its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York.

It is one of the most hyped listings ever and by far the largest.

In total, SpaceX is selling new shares for 75 billion dollars, 712 billion Swedish kronor. The second largest listing was when Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco went public in 2019. That time, the company raised 29 billion dollars.

Investing in stocks should normally be something that is primarily done with a calculator in hand. But anyone buying shares in SpaceX must, above all, use their imagination.

The price of 135 dollars per share means that SpaceX's market value lands at 1,770 billion dollars (just under 17,000 billion kronor) or almost 95 times last year's revenue.

***

As recently as March 2020, SpaceX was valued at 34 billion dollars. The growth in value since then makes the company's own rockets look like moisture-damaged firecrackers.

It is also a valuation that defies gravity. Recently, AI competitor Alphabet raised a total of 85 billion dollars from investors through a new share issue, a record for a company already on the stock exchange.

Alphabet is valued at around ten times its sales.

***

But then again, selling dreams is also something of Elon Musk's superpower. It has been a long time since the valuation of Tesla, with a market cap of 11,000 billion, was about cars. It is based almost entirely on Elon Musk's promises of robots and self-driving taxis.

***

Even those who do not believe in the visions will be involuntarily drawn into the dream, as SpaceX becomes large enough to end up in the portfolios of all funds and pension managers around the world that track indexes. Millions of people will thereby become shareholders in the company.

***

The question, of course, is what happens next. Just in the last few days, there has been more nervousness around AI stocks. Companies are worrying about the high costs of letting their employees use AI without restrictions. There have also been several studies suggesting that AI investments have not yet generated as much new revenue as expected.

And the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that OpenAI plans to lower its price to compete with Anthropic. Price wars are usually not very good for profitability.

***

Perhaps all the visions will come true and SpaceX will be the starting point for a new era of humanity.

But it could very well turn out that we look back on 2025 and 2026 as a crazy time when many lost their footing. Something to laugh harshly at in hindsight.

“Do you remember the SpaceX prospectus? Elon Musk was going to get a 1,200 billion bonus if he put a million people on Mars”.

#SpaceX #ElonMusk #capitalism #ArtificialIntelligence #AI

Today Olivia Rodrigo's new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so much in love is released. I really like the Olivia Rodrigo/Robert Smith combo.

Robert Smith sings background vocals on the song 'what's wrong with me'.

'drop dead' is the lead single from the new album that's released today. Part of the lyrics:

you know all all the words to 'Just Like Heaven' And I know why he wrote them now that you're standin' right here

It's cute.

The songs on the album are mostly much better than what's heard on Taylor Swift's new album.

#music #MusicTips #OliviaRodrigo #RobertSmith #pop

I just discovered Iskandr's latest single, which consists of the three last singles to be released from their coming album, Sacraal. The band are on Eisenwald, a weird and wondrous record label.

Qobuz calls the single 'alternative & indie'. Record Club call them a black-metal band. The second song on the latest single off the album combines old-school acoustic instruments with reverbed-the-hell-out vocals, goth elements, gloom shit, and...techno?

That's it. The single is great. I'm buying Sacraal.

#music #MusicTips #BlackMetal #techno #experimental #goth #alternative