Peter Kennedy Archive A kindred spirit to Alan Lomax (with whom he worked), Peter Douglas Kennedy collected British and Irish folks songs from the ’50s up through the aughts. The Peter Kennedy Archive, a new website, draws upon his ’50s recordings as catalogued in the British Library. The amount of raw material to draw upon is large (over 1,660 open reel tapes and 500 DAT tapes for starters. This site allows you to browse Kennedy’s reports to learn more about the circumstances of each recording or go through a performer’s index that can funnel you straight to those tapes already digitized […]

Before North Carolina passed its HB2 legislation, officially known as “An act to provide for single-sex multiple occupancy bathroom and changing facilities in schools and public agencies and to create statewide consistency in regulation of employment and public accommodations” (or, for me, the simpler and more accurate “WTF?”), I’d been looking forward to covering two film festivals back-to-back on my very first visit to the southern state. Yet as the nationwide call for boycott gathered speed, and the opening night of Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival approached, I found myself in a queasy quandary. So I did what any […]

Ironically launching at the stellar Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina right as the anti-LGBTQ HB2 legislation hit the fan, S. Leo Chiang and Johnny Symons’s Out Run follows the Ladlad Party in the Philippines — the only LGBT political party in the world — in the run-up to what could be a history-making election. An artistic political doc, Out Run is both riveting and familiar, as the leaders (including Bemz Benedito, a trans woman who serves as the face of the party) deftly employ campaign strategies that include everything from transforming beauty parlors into headquarters to […]