Death Stars, Sex Clubs, and Emeli Sandé

Friday arrives like a pardon from a death sentence you’d almost made peace with. Off come the real clothes. The weekend stretches out ahead, gloriously empty, waiting to be wasted on all the right things.

Emeli Sandé had just put her debut album Our Version of Events up for full streaming, and it was worth sitting down with properly—she had a voice that made songs feel like you’d known them before she’d finished writing them. Grimes was also at that precise moment of early ascendancy where everything she’d released felt like it was being invented from scratch inside a strange, very small room. Worth consuming all of it immediately, before the hype machine either broke her or turned her into someone unrecognizable.

Outside the music: Sacha Baron Cohen was threatening to arrive at the Oscars in full costume as The Dictator, complete with an urn allegedly containing Kim Jong-il’s ashes, and the Academy was handling this with roughly the grace you’d expect from an institution that takes itself that seriously. There was also a piece circulating on what it would actually cost to build a Death Star—around 853 quadrillion dollars, a number that stops meaning anything around the fifteenth zero. You live once.

Stephen Hawking had reportedly been photographed outside a sex club in California, which struck me as philosophically correct in a way I couldn’t argue against. The universe is probably indifferent. Consciousness is probably an accident. Go to the club.

Round it all out with footage of models falling on catwalks—which never stops being funny and never will—some vodka, and a firm policy of doing nothing useful until Sunday ends. That’s the whole plan. I’m comfortable with it.