Bamboo Bed

“Bamboo Bed” chronicles (the author’s) life in the immediate pre-Marcos and Martial Law eras as he moved in and out of the country’s jails—at one point sharing the same prison cell as the historian William Henry Scott—while circulating among an impressive circle of Manila’s gangsters, artists, ex-rebels, bohemians, drug addicts, politicians and assorted cognoscenti. “Bamboo Bed” is intelligently and beautifully written, a rare document by a post-colonial American who has moved between the centers and margins of power. In this account of the tempestuous antecedents of late 20th century Manila, Mac gives us no less than a visceral map of the modern Philippines that is at once hallucinatory and prophetic.—Vicente L. Rafael, Univ. of Washington, Seattle
Weldon “Mac” McCarty is a musician and author and presently lives and writes in Quezon City.

About the Author

Mac (Weldon M.) McCarty is a musician and author who has begun and abandoned numerous careers in support of his art habits. Many of those activities have taken place in Manila, where he has lived much of his life. He grew up in Weatherford, Texas, and spent fourteen years of the Marcos dictatorship as a martial law exile in the San Francisco Bay Area. He presently lives and writes in Quezon City.