Chakrabarti with theatre maker Louise Lowe and myself will explore the many shades of feminism today at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin this evening at 6pm.

Rachel Holmes is a writer, activist, programmer and teacher, andformer Director of Literature & Spoken Word at London’s Southbank Centre. Shami Chakrabarti is the Director of the civil liberties advocacy organisation, Liberty. Earlier this year she was named in BBC Radio 4’s list of the 100 most powerful women in the UK. Louise Lowe is a theatre director and playwright and Artistic Director of Anu Productions, whose recent productions include the acclaimed The Boys of Foley Street at the Dublin Theatre Festival.

Tickets are €10 (€8 concession) and you can purchase them here.

The first one that’s gabbed my interest is the upcoming Magnolia Pictures doc Venus & Serena being picked up by Kaleidoscope for the UK. The film traces the lives and careers of Venus and Serena Williams, and the trailer looks great. Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This year, the festival will open with a gay and lesbian weekend for the first time, with Panti descending on Clare as the Mistress of Ceremonies.

The event hopes to attract LGBT tourists from near and far. Donal Mulligan, one of the organisers who is no stranger to matching Irish traditions and LGBT audiences (see his Poorhouse night at Pantibar, his Eurovision parties, and more) says “Traditional Irish events like céilí dances have had it right for hundreds of years, they’re the perfect way to meet new people in a lively, comfortable and fun atmosphere. We’re taking the best of old Ireland – music, dancing and matchmaking – and putting it together with the variety of entertainment on offer in the LGBT community.”

Mulligan, and co-organiser Eddie McGuinness are hoping to raise awareness for BeLonGTo during the event.

Jolie is frank and unflinching in her description of the operations she’s undergone, writing that she’s talking about this now in order to highlight options available to women who do not know they might be “living under the shadow of cancer.”

She also writes about access to testing: “Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.”

A few people (including the web editor of The Guardian) have pointed out how the New York Times treated the story, in a muted manner and not as the “big exclusive” that it is. Well, (a) the New York Times has class, and although plenty of publications and websites have spent many years obsessing over Jolie’s breasts this is a SLIGHTLY different situation. And (b) Jolie writes this piece in a completely detached and frank way, the way someone should write an awareness raising piece. There’s no self-indulgent ‘woe is me’ emotional rollercoastering, no drama, no ‘My Cancer Hell’ bullshit. She’s telling her story to let other women know what their options are. I didn’t even know a preventative double mastectomy was a thing. And that’s why it’s important that women with breast and ovarian cancer in their families and other women at risk through the very make-up of their genes read this and from it take new information, awareness and hope. This isn’t celeb goss.

We’re looking for your personal accounts. Contact The Irish Times in confidence and tell us: Was your internship a success? Did you get employment out of it? Was your internship easy or difficult to secure? Was it paid or unpaid? Are you currently interning and would you like to tell us about your experience? Email internstories@irishtimes.com or tweet @UnaMullally

The opening scene of the HBO series Girls summed up the financial and employment stress affecting many young Americans. Hannah, the lead character, is stunned as her parents cut off her financial support; her sense of entitlement, her fear and her lack of secure employment create one of the great tensions between baby boomers and millenials stateside.

Employment rates among young people in the US are at an all-time low, with just 54 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds in employment. And those with jobs have seen their salaries fall by 6 per cent, a bigger drop than in any other age group.
As more western cities ape the internship culture of the US, the gap between graduating and getting paid to work appears to be widening. So what can Ireland learn from the United States’ embedded intern culture?

Hamilton Nolan, who has written extensively, on gawker.com, about employment and internships, is unambiguous. “It’s a system that rips off young people and benefits companies. It’s essentially unpaid labour, which should not be accepted as a phenomenon,” he says. “The problem is that by the time this drawback became clear, the internship system was so entrenched among desirable employers that young people had little recourse but to participate. But it clearly creates a hardship for them.”

The US is different because intern culture has been long-standing between colleges, universities and companies from Wall Street to Washington DC. There is an expectation of starting at the bottom and working your way up through an internship. Internships aren’t necessarily as much about creating employment as they are about teaching skills.

Lauren Berger, author of All Work, No Pay, is the founder and chief executive of internqueen.com, a free resource for students that works with more than 1,000 employers, mostly in the US, and gives advice and tips. Berger knows the landscape. At college she did many internships. “I can definitely understand all perspectives of the argument. I’m a person who had 15 unpaid internships, and they were priceless opportunities that taught me so much,” Berger says.
As for whether interns might be paid, “In the US we’re looking five or 10 years down the line, heading in a direction where all internships could be paid. But we don’t want to lose the purpose of them. It’s not to get a pay cheque but to get valuable experience.”

Berger occasionally comes across small companies that think, “Define an internship: free work – that’s what I need! But the Fortune 500 companies have structured programmes and learning experiences tailored to fit the students’ needs,” says Berger. “Every once in a while you get a start-up or a small company and they want to hire 20 interns instead of employees, and of course that’s wrong.”

Berger points to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which has guidelines that unpaid internships must meet in order to be legally sound. “It’s criticised because it’s a little ambiguous, but I think that the most important thing in there is that an intern should not be directly generating revenue for a company.” Berger emphasises that an internship isn’t about employment. “Thinking an internship should generate a job is a skewed mindset,” she says. Instead, it should give the intern learning, contacts and experience.

Intern culture creates other underlying issues for specific industries. “One main effect is to make it extremely hard for young people without many family financial resources to enter the media field,” Hamilton Nolan says. “When you already have student loans and you need to work to pay rent, it’s not too easy to take an unpaid internship. This fact is especially damaging in journalism, which should be going out of its way to draw in a wide variety of voices, which translate to good coverage of society as a whole.”

In the UK, one survey has found that just 3 per cent of junior journalists had a working-class parent; the website graduatefog.co.uk draws a link between the necessity for financial support before entering the profession and the proliferation of unpaid internships.

In Ireland the extension of internships from traditionally desirable workplaces, and industries perceived as hard to access , to those perceived to be less desirable was made official by JobBridge. By creating a Government scheme within what had been an unregulated market – dominated by casual internship schemes, university work placements and more official Fortune 500 company training programmes – State-sponsored internships are now available in many sectors.

JobBridge is creating jobs, according to a review by Indecon this week. (Alan Gray, a managing partner at Indecon, used the study as the basis of a positive analysis that he wrote for one Irish newspaper.)Nearly 17,000 people have taken part in JobBridge. Just over half of respondents finished their internships; 61 per cent of those who completed JobBridge internships secured paid employment. Twenty-six per cent stayed with the company they had interned with, 23 per cent moved to another sector and 12 per cent found paid work within the same sector. At the time of the survey, 23 per cent were still looking for work, 3 per cent had emigrated, 8 per cent were in further education or training, and 5 per cent had completed a stint of short-term employment.

Although the intern culture has become entrenched in American society, and is becoming more so in Europe, Nolan says that it’s not an absolute that it will remain so, although he believes that intern culture has closed off many industries to poor and middle-class people.

“I imagine at some point there will be tighter regulation. I do think that the generation that experienced the unfairness of the system will want to change it once they rise to power,” he says. “I see it much like the minimum wage: companies will always do things that benefit them as long as they can get away with it. It’s up to society (and the industry) collectively to decide that this isn’t something we should accept.” And the intern queen’s number-one piece of advice for prospective interns? “Walk in every day and think, How can I make the most of this situation? Don’t be the intern who sits in the corner on Facebook.” Unless you’re interning at Facebook, of course.

This is an artist at the top of her game. By the end of this tour, her and Jay-Z will be a billion dollar couple. And at the O2 in the capital, she worked hard for her money.
The work was effortless, the professionalism natural, the celebrity well earned. Her support act Luke James, a New Orleans RnB singer, serenaded a rose and then set up Beyonce’s arrival, “if it was not for her, I wouldn’t be here… That woman, her name is Mrs. Carter… Her name is Beyonce.”

The screams shook the roof of the auditorium, but still a wait was in store. At twenty minutes past nine, after a video for Chime For Change, a campaign to promote education and justice for girls globally, followed by a Pepsi ad – both matching Beyonce’s penchant for charity and commercialism – the lights went off.

The refrain of “who run the world, GIRLS” rang out and the Texan singer was in the building. The excitement was amplified by the screams of women of all ages, and some men, all invested and in awe of Beyonce’s message of female empowerment, her phenomenal vocal ability, songwriting skills, and a spectacle that would make Madonna, Rihanna and Lady Gaga go back to the drawing board.

It’s unusual for a star not to be touring an album, but Beyonce’s latest record is still in limbo. Her recent songs have been overshadowed by multi-million H&M and Pepsi campaigns, and her cannon of hits was held back for lesser-known numbers and a misjudged arrangement of ‘If I Were A Boy’.

Above the stage, her all-female band led by guitarist Bibi McGill occasionally encroached on Knowles’ note-prefect vocal. Everything-along-with-the-kitchen-sink visuals depicted the singer as Marie Antoinette and Nefertiti. Video messages halfway between perfume ads and Oprah monologues offered spiritual embellishment.

Then the hits came – ‘Crazy In Love’, ‘Single Ladies’ and ‘Irreplaceable’ brought the gods to their feet. Glitter fell, fists were raised, Beyonce clutched the hands of those in the front row. A tribute to Whitney Houston preceded ‘Halo’. A chorus of ‘Ole Ole Ole’ was led by the woman herself holding a tricolour and appreciating the amplified cheering and stomping. When the curtain finally fell, the audience were shaking their heads at the audacity and brilliance of one woman on stage.

Her relentless choreography, embellished by the dancers Les Twins, her appreciation for the crowd, and ultimately the bombastic nature of her vocal abilities made the songs soar.

As the crowd filtered out on to the quays, the choruses and refrains rang out and were carried on the cutting wind. Who run the world? Ms Knowles.

When the talk goes up on the website, I’ll add it to this post, but for now, here are the ten highlights (slightly short of 77 million.)

1. Sympathetic V Parasympathetic
Eno says there are two ways people react to art, and also I suppose two states of being, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. For him, the sympathetic relates to the fight or flight state many people exist in, particularly in urban environments. The parasympathetic is more about the idea of digest, rest and process. As he was talking about this, I began to think about the desire one has as a city dweller to escape city life once in a while in order to have a larger vista devoid of buildings to put one’s spirit at ease. Eno said that too much priority is given to people who are experts at control. What is more interesting is the act of surrender, an active choice not to take control, to flow with a situation and deliberately let go. Eno said a perfect analogy for this is surfing. He doesn’t surf (he made a funny point saying that he doesn’t really do such things, but just watches documentaries about them and comes up with his own theories) but watching surfers, he feels as though they take control of their position, then surrender to the wave, then take control, then surrender again. Perhaps that’s why we find surfing so captivating, because we are watching surrender in action.

2. Scenius
I’d heard of Eno’s concept of scenius before – that genius exists, but often emerges from a collective intelligence of a scene, so genius can actually be a communal thing as well as an individual concept – and it has been touched on elsewhere. For example, much of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory of outliers is in fact one of scenius when you think about it – that circumstances and collective minds contributed to one person excelling at a given time and place amongst given people. Eno spoke about when he went to an exhibition in the Barbican twenty years ago of early 20th century Russian painters. He said that this was a genre of art that he thought he knew a lot about, being a nerd about painters he presumed were far removed from the fringes of Kandinsky that he imagined few people had even heard of. But when he got to the exhibition, there were over 100 works by artists he didn’t know. On top of that, their art was really good. In fact he realised there was very little difference in quality between the paintings he’d never come across and the ones he knew. Therefore, a genius isn’t just someone who stands out, but also the product of collective intelligence and talent.

3. The importance of being in a choir
Eno followed on from his surfing analogy by talking about the importance of being in a choir. The point of being in a choir, he said, is that you don’t stand out. Singers who work well in choirs are those “who just want to be part of the sound.” He has an a capella group in London (there’s an NPR report on it here), and sees a choir as an opportunity to step away from individualism and instead create a “community sound”.

4. The artistic inadequacies of options
Eno put a question to the room: doesn’t anyone find it strange that in the second decade of the 21st century, the most interesting music is still being made with primitive instruments? Why is that? The problem with digital technology, Eno said, is that options keep proliferating. The reason primitive instruments – guitars, drums kits which could be anything, he said, even a bunch of old chairs – excel is because you know their limits and then grapple with those limits. WIth software, you never know what it does and where the options end. Often, because of these endless options, if you don’t have an idea there is a temptation of cover that up by just selecting another option.

5. Giving oneself constraints
So in a digital world, with endless options in music software, it’s important to give oneself constraints. Eno often bans options in his studio. He will create constraints. Sometimes, he said, he’ll say “today there will be no multiplication in studio”, which doesn’t just mean no multi-tracking but also things like no echo. Another method he uses to create constraints is to say that on a given day he won’t use anything on one particular side of the room. Another method is removing cymbals from drums.

6. Why the art world hates popular
Talking a little about niche versus popular, Eno said that people in the art world are afraid of popular. It means that if you like something everyone else likes, then you might actually be like everyone else. Ultimately, he said, it’s a class thing. He talked about how everyone in the art world seemed to like Antony Gormley until he became popular, and when he did, all of a sudden he wasn’t as good, just because the masses dug his stuff. He also spoke about ABBA. When ABBA were making music, he said, people were ashamed to say they liked them, hiding in the corner playing ABBA records. Yet now, everyone recognises that ABBA were brilliant and made great songs. I guess the same goes for lots of revisionism amongst critics about what is cool now when it blatantly wasn’t seen as such at the time. You could probably fit a lot of acts into this category; Duran Duran, Girls Aloud, Dolly Parton and so on.

7. Deadlines work
Eno has 2,809 unreleased pieces of music in his archive. When a person in the room asked “how do you finish?” he said “when there’s a deadline.” A deadline gives him a destination and a reason. He said two things make good records: deadlines and small budgets. And two things make bad records: no deadlines and big budgets.

8. Passion in music
Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) was sitting next to myself and Jim Carroll during the talk and asked a question at the end that loosely related to passion in music. Hebden said that although he is an atheist, he finds himself listening to religious music because of the intensity and passion that lies within it. So how does he go about making his music sound like that? Eno joked “find Jesus”. And then elaborated, “what you like is the sound of someone being opened up.” In religious music, Eno said, people are completely engaged in it in a non-egotistical way. They are there to receive something and articulate it musically not for themselves but for a greater being or power. Eno said the performance of religious music sees people adopt a vulnerable and trusting condition. He told Hebden to find the moments when he got that feeling. Admit to yourself when that feeling is happening to you – as it might not be a part of you that you want to expose. When Hebden said he makes electronic music, Eno said that maybe he needs to try something on a busted old guitar. Eno said that for him, this moment is singing, something that he decided 30 years ago wasn’t cool, but it makes him feel a certain way that satisfies him. Rawness also works. “The reason we like The Velvet Underground is not for their gloss,” he said. When something is new, you don’t know how to make it better. Bureaucratic thinking comes afterwards and introduces professionalism into the process. By making something “professional” – removing the raw, new nature of it, taking out mistakes, making the production slick and shiny – that often takes away what was good about it in the first place. Mistakes are good, and that’s something that musicians say all the time. That sentiment echoed something Giorgio Moroder said recently in one of the Creators Project videos about basslines in some of his productions being slightly dodgy but still sounding good.

9. Education systems are wrong
Eno said education systems are designed to take away people’s creativity. People are actually endowed with a lot of creativity when they are born, he said, but education is trying to teach people to fit into society as it stands now, which is preposterous as those exiting the education system will be doing so years later when society will inevitably have changed. He said everyone should go to a British art school, saying that art school should be about learning which part of your creativity you should decide to explore and how to apply creativity to situations, not just learning how to be good at painting flowers.

10. Peace Be Still
This is a song Eno and James Blake listened to while working together. Eno describes a moment in it where the absence of music is incredibly powerful, where a hole appears and the music falls into it. James Blake, like many artists (and this goes back to John Cage’s philosophy again which I wrote about in my RBMA post on Stephen O’Malley), trades on the absence of music, where space and vacuums in songs are as significant as the notes, beats and noises themselves. Eno said Blake works by subtraction, constantly taking as much as possible away from a piece of music until it becomes a skeletal structure. He also said they drank a lot of tea: “tea is just an excuse to sit there”, Eno said, adding that when you have something that you constantly need to put in your mouth, it’s useful because then you don’t need to talk. Here is the recording of ‘Peace Be Still’ he referenced.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m not sure if there is anything less punk than Kim Kardashian dressed as a Givenchy curtain, but perhaps it’s Anna Wintour in a Chanel floral gown. Both were the outfits of choice at the Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York last Monday. Each year, the red-carpet event is used by celebrities to take risks in edgier creations that are perceived as too daring for awards ceremonies. And this year, the ball coincided with an exhibition titled Punk: Chaos to Couture at the museum.

It was a disastrous match from the get go. Beautiful millionaires attempting rawness ended up with none of the fun needed to pull it off, with zero edge to the outfits worn, and all the authenticity of a suburban “super sweet 16” princess throwing a pimps’n’hoes party. Ivanka Trump wore a spiked necklace. Marissa Mayer streaked her hair with colours like a teenager off to a school disco. Miley Cyrus spiked her hair.

Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t get the memo and turned up at an after party in the Standard Hotel wearing a flannel shirt and cap in an outfit that looked straight out of Williamsburg, the Brooklyn neighbourhood that made the hipster look mainstream. On the complete flipside of punk, DiCaprio’s turn in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby is currently monopolising window displays across Manhattan, with countless shop fronts arranging their apparel around the film’s look. At Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue, Carey Mulligan’s face stares vacantly from posters in cabinets.

Yet punk was from fashion born. The aesthetic, led by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren on the other side of the Atlantic, turned rebellion into a far more confrontational image than rock’n’roll. The misguided sanitisation of a genre of style that is utterly dirty, recycled, refurbished, torn up, pierced, ripped, stained and sweated on shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who is aware of Wintour’s disdain for cool (Wintour heads up the Met Ball). The successor of punk in fashion terms was grunge, its pinnacle being Marc Jacobs’s Perry Ellis collection shown in New York in 1992, which saw sniggers echo from Seattle all the way to the catwalk. But that phase was to be short-lived in fashion magazines, and especially in the pages of Vogue , when Wintour put the skids on anything that eschewed glamour. In fact, it’s strange that Wintour went along with the punk theme at all, even if it did give her an opportunity to approve the installation of a razorblade chandelier.

High fashion has always fleeced the flimsiest elements of subculture and softened the edges for the purposes of a “look”. Fashion events may be slaves to rigid themes, yet there’s still something awful about Tommy Hilfiger – the god of prepiness, whose Hamptons-on-casual-Friday look spawned an industry of boring high-street menswear – turning up to the punk party in a tartan jacket looking more like a cheesy American cousin at a Scottish wedding than Sid Vicious.
The subtext of this embarrassing masquerade ball is, of course, the ongoing gentrification of Manhattan, and the hipster soil creep throughout Brooklyn.
“I saw white folks in Bed-Stuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighbourhood],” Erykah Badu joked at a Red Bull Music Academy talk she gave at the Brooklyn Museum last week. The barbed comment was met with uproarious laughter from the largely African-American crowd who are all too aware of the gentrification of Williamsburg, Bushwick and now Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The punkness of Lower Manhattan – where Nicole Richie and her shock of silver hair and Sarah Jessica Parker with a Mohawk headpiece took their inspiration from – has been utterly eroded. The former CBGBs has been home to John Varatos for five years now, a shop where a pair of men’s jeans will set you back $300. Inside the Met, the club’s infamous bathrooms were recreated, probably minus the smell. Downtown, the Chelsea Hotel was sold to developer Joseph Chetrit two years ago for $80 million and arguments with permanent residents are ongoing. Dive bars have been replaced with chichi cafes and high-end boutiques. Back in midtown, in Uniqlo’s largest store in the world on Fifth Avenue, T-shirts are adorned with licensed Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat images, co-opting their pop-punk artwork for the masses.

One person did stick out, though. In the absence of Lady Gaga, Madonna emerged victorious. You can take the girl out of the Lower East Side, but she’ll still turn up to your posh party pants-less in fishnets. She was virtually alone in understanding the theme. The event may have billed itself as chaos to couture, but in the end it was just cringe.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Steven Soderbergh is one of my favourite directors. He’s brilliant because he is prolific, diverse, unapologetic about populism, but also still has to operate outside of the studio system when making a film about Liberace. He is smart – ‘Traffic’, ‘Sex, Lies and Videotape’. Fun – the ‘Oceans’ series. Surprising – ‘Magic Mike’. Sentimental and righteous – ‘Erin Brokovich’. And sometimes he gets it wrong. And then he moves on. I also like the way he shoots most of his stuff himself, which is especially impressive considering his films are so varied.

“I get it, it’s the studio, you need comedy, you need horror films, you need action films, you need animated films, I get it. But the point is, can’t some of these be cinema also?”

Of course Soderbergh has said he’s done with making movies, which is why this address he gave at the San Francisco International Film Festival is even more interesting. Listen to it here.