Michael Patrick MacDonald – Blog

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Solidarity Event is this Sunday, April 22nd at 2pm, at Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook Brooklyn (34 Van Dyke Street, Brooklyn).
Solidarity against Internment and for Human Rights. Bands, readings, Arts slide show, and postcards to Owen Paterson demanding the release of Marian Price.

From the Brehons:

52 Duane Street
New York, New York

April 9, 2012

Statement Concerning the Internment of Marian Price

The Brehon Law Society views with increasing alarm the violations of substantive due process evident in the continued indefinite detention of Marian Price.

Mrs. Marian Price McGlinchey was imprisoned on order of a British official, the Secretary of State of Northern Ireland, on May 15, 2011. She was charged with holding a piece of paper containing a speech given by another person at a commemoration ceremony in Derry’s city cemetery. The British government, unconstrained by a bill of rights or written constitution, can send one to prison for holding a piece of paper on which are written words challenging the legitimacy of that government.

Marian Price had been imprisoned in 1973 for attacking British government buildings in London. She was freed in 1980 suffering from tuberculosis and anorexia, and weighing around 70 pounds. Her lawyers insist that her release was based on a royal pardon, which would mean that the Secretary of State had no legal power to order her detention. However, the Secretary of State’s lawyers say that “extensive searches” have failed to locate the crucial document. They claimed a copy destroyed by government officials in 2010 was the only copy that existed, so its exact terms cannot be established. But, they add, the “surrounding circumstances” of 1980 suggest that Price was not pardoned but conditionally released.

A judge ordered her release on bail on the paper holding charge, but she continues to be interned nonetheless. A fix had been arranged by the British Secretary of State in case the bail hearing went against the government, which it did.

The British authorities in Northern Ireland realized that putting someone in prison on the pretext of holding a piece of paper was likely to raise eyebrows — even among Tories who have regard for the rule of law. An embarrassed government searched for another excuse to justify Marian’s internment.

Two British soldiers were killed in Northern Ireland in March 2009. Marian was questioned in November 2009 about a mobile phone allegedly used by those suspected of involvement in the killings, but no charges were brought against her. The principal target of the police investigation was later found not guilty after a full trial. Marian has had no trial but she remains in prison despite the bail order and the collapse of the government’s case against the target defendant.

The British Guardian newspaper reported that when Marian was scheduled to appear before a Belfast Magistrates Court for a preliminary hearing, she was not produced when it emerged that her defense counsel wanted to cross-examine three witnesses, including two senior detectives, as part of their challenge to the case against her.

The law can be terribly awkward for a government intent on keeping a 57 year old woman in prison without credible charges.

Should the British Secretary of State and other authorities not learn to curb the arbitrary and capricious way in which they wield power and imprison opponents on the flimsiest of pretexts and without recourse to the courts, we may again witness an upsurge of support for those whom the government seeks to suppress. The government, the law, the peace, and ultimately the people of Northern Ireland will suffer.

The British government and its ministers should trust in the rule of the law instead of thwarting it, as they do with increasing frequency. They have refused to hold the promised public inquiry into the role of their agents in the murder of human rights lawyers Pat Finucane and they have refused to cooperate with investigations of the Dublin/ Monaghan bombings, which led to the largest loss of life during the Troubles.

Internment of a 57 year old woman for holding a piece of paper on which are written words of criticism of a government shocks the conscience when that internment is imposed by the same government that delayed and thwarted investigations into death of its own subjects and blocked an investigation of its involvement in deaths of the citizens of another state.

We urge the British government to respect the rule of law and cease the unjustified internment of Marian Price.

Comhar na Saoithe; Writer’s Night at Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook Brooklyn Saturday April 28th, 2012

A Night of Comhar na Saoithe (pron. co’r na seeh’e): A celebration of artistic community, cooperation, & friendship, with Brooklyn’s own Pete Hamill, Ed Conlon (“Blue Blood,” “Red on Red”), Michael Patrick MacDonald (“All Souls: A Family Story from Southie,” “Easter Rising”), and music by Seanchai
CLICK ON PHOTO OF PETE FOR MORE!

CLICK ON IMAGE FOR SONGS LINK

* Note: This was written before the Occupy Wall Street movement began. Otherwise that movement would have been mentioned in relation to growing populist uprising and, of course, the very concept of the Shantytown.

… of all places to witness human misery, ignorance, degradation, filth and wretchedness, an Irish hut is pre-eminent … I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over. — Frederick Douglass

With Elizabeth Windsor’s recent visit to the land her family once reduced to a deprivation that shocked even a former slave, the world praised the monarch’s beneficence in helping the Irish people to finally “move on.” We were advised by Her Royal Highness that we ought to “bow to the past, but not be bound by it,” curious words for a birthright monarch. Indeed, the press subsequently bowed to her majesty, urging us all that to be modern meant to embrace the world’s greatest symbol of feudal privilege and inequality. The ideals of the Republic were suddenly made to seem so 1916. Or worse, so 18th century Wexford … France … or America.

Too often the Irish and Ireland’s diaspora are asked to bury the past: in particular that history of rebellion against the grave injustices that the Irish shanty dweller knew, the very injustices that today’s shanty dweller suffers — from Kingston to Soweto, East New York to East Kentucky.

Few people today associate the globalized Shantytown (wherein 1/6 of the world’s population currently lives in subhuman misery) with the Irish people. The original Shantytown, though — where Central Park is today — was filled with the impoverished Irish who’d fled An Gorta Mor. Fewer people recognize that the word shanty itself comes from the seditious Irish tongue (sean tigh or “old house”)

True to their name, Seanchai, are keepers of that memory, reminders of our history. Lyrically, the CD SHANTYTOWN is, first and foremost, about remembering where we come from. And the CD’s lyrics travel the world over, upon Afro-Caribbean-Latin-Celtic rhythms, returning via the Jersey Interstate (with a rendition of Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street”), and back home again to the sean tigh, the only place from which we can truly understand what Frederick Douglass understood: that “the cause of humanity is one the world over.”

Dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail, a shantytown… — Desmond Dekker, 0-0-7, from “The Harder They Come.”

The sean tigh of di sufferah, as the poor and oppressed are called in Rasta parlance, is an old house indeed, one that many Irish and Irish American people have moved out of, physically. We who choose to remember are often accused, however, of clinging to the sean tigh, an old house of nursed resentments, bitterness, and the fabled Irish “chip on the shoulder.” “Move out,” we’re told. “Run — don’t walk — away from that very old house!”

But who says this old house must be dilapidated? Certainly the physical shanty we come from was a shack. And while, for some, a shack inspires great shame or cultural amnesia, Seanchai’s old house is, in fact, an ancient but sturdy house. A house of spirits, of memory, it inspires a call for social justice everywhere, and hopefully rebellion. And while the injustices of the shantytown have produced many a shoot-em-up rude boy (whether in Kingston, Brooklyn, or my own native Southie), so too have they produced conscious Soul Rebels like Seanchai.

Of course, those who are invested in Irish people forgetting, becoming “White” and “moving on,” might insist that the Irish history of oppression is no longer relevant. Unfortunately, though, famine, racism, slavery, civil rights, human rights, immigration, and exploitation of workers are today as relevant as ever. And all of these themes ought to connect all people of Irish descent to the life of today’s sufferah. There really is no other reason to remember other than for the sake of the current world we live in, and for the sake of solidarity during what will become even harder times.

Start thinking WE instead of ME, move as a community, step together for the common good … – Seanchai “Generation of Freedom”

In their hope-filled anthem, “Generation of Freedom,” Seanchai connects past with present, recalling Padraig Pearse’s words: Beware of the risen people, and calling for organized mobilization: People all across this land; Find it hard to understand; Suffering for the sins of the elite; Desperation everywhere; But something’s going on out there; People gonna get back on the street. And as the economies of Ireland, Greece, and Portugal collapse; the excesses of Wall Street bring back American shantytowns and Hoovervilles; and British class disparity exacerbates to the point of unprecedented multi-cultural youth uprisings, Seanchai’s urging could not be more timely: Storm the palace I don’t care, I’ll sleep like a millionaire, time for us to take what they won’t give.

Communication with the past for the sake of the present is exactly the role of the Seanchai in traditional Irish culture. This role is no better exemplified than in this CD’s “Rebel Heart.” What sounds like a trad lament on the uillean pipes turns out to be anything but a lament. Instead the song is a determined embrace of that rebel heart (borne of poverty and degradation) that is our inheritance: Now I carry with me the worker’s dignity in this rebel heart of mine. Significantly, the song references “Kerry boy” Mike Quill, who organized New York City’s Transport Workers’ Union, and whose own quest for workers’ rights in NYC was borne of the history of Irish insurrection against tyranny. Quill was in the I.R.A. at the time of Independence and Civil War, and Clan na Gael unionized New York City’s subway workers, inspiring workers’ rights movements nationally. “Rebel Heart” harkens back to a history of poverty and degradation that gives birth to rebellion, and connects us to social justice issues everywhere we go. Just as Quill took his own Fenian rebel heart to the fight for fairness on NYC’s streets, Seanchai singer, Chris Byrne brings his immigrant forebears to today’s struggles: immigration is strange, no matter how things change, the picture stays the same.

Beyond being the “unrepentant Fenian bastards” they are, Seanchai brings us to a kitchen racket in a Shantytown that is filled with all of the realities of working class life past and present. “Somewhere To Go,” sung by legendary Red Hook bean sidh, Rachel Fitzpatrick, is a sad song about abuse and addiction, while the dancy — almost African Hi-Life — rhythms of “Band of Brothers” induce us to revel in the boozing and bonding of vets with PTSD. “Real McCoy” is about historic smuggling in the shantytown of Red Hook, which Seanchai calls home. And Purgatorio lights up the CD with Latin rhythms, an homage to a man nicknamed “San Patricio,” who likes to drink a lot. Seanchai’s insistence on a revolution we can dance to, culminates in the band’s “Stylin’ on Our Island,” an uillean pipe-infused Reggae tribute to Eire (much like Jamaican love songs to their island). And when they break into “Rebel Medley,” a mix of the band’s greatest Fenian hits, the prominence of Rachel’s beautifully sung Oro, se do bheatha ‘bhaile (Oro you are welcome home), tells us we are indeed back home in this sean tigh, where sedition’s our tradition.

Main Street mobs just want jobs, we’re not getting what we need
Play by the rules, feel like a fool, Ring-a-leevio one two three.

– Seanchai, “Shantytown”

In the long tradition of Irish rebel music, Seanchai’s CD, Shantytown, uses what Jamaicans call “conscious lyrics” to raise consciousness, promote working class politics across the false boundaries of race, and to have a little bit of fun and a lot of dancing in the process. All of which might be a bit “beyond the Pale” for Elizabeth Windsor, and for so many others who would like us to forget who we are and this old house from which we come. Seanchai’s recommendation to them ought to be loud and clear: … So kiss my royal Irish ass! Gonna, gonna, gonna, gonna hold the ground. Holding it down in Shantytown …

The Resurrection of Cornelius Larkin

MIchael Patrick MacDonald and Dropkick Murphys

This past Fall I had the pleasure of serving for the third year in a row as Writer in Residence for Northeastern’s Honors Department. For the third year I taught the the seminar class I created for the department in 2008: Non Fiction Writing and Social Justice Issues.

Every year, some students who enter my writing class have not previously been in “seminar” classrooms. The circle set-up and casual tone of the class can throw students off, at first. But they get over it when the pizza arrives. In seminar we arrange chairs into a circle, and we talk (and sometimes eat pizza). We talk about writing, focusing on the elements of “voice,” tone, structure, the role of vulnerability in this type of writing, of being able to “go there,” and of humor. We talk about social issues and efforts to deal with them. And we visit community-based organizations working specifically on poverty, crime & violence, and youth development. We talk about how these issues have been represented in various genres of non-fiction writing: memoir, straight journalism with omniscient voice, personal journalism (using first person singular “I”), and opinion pieces. We do writing workshops in class, two-page take-home assignments, and allow students to read their work aloud when they’re ready.

Ultimately each student works toward a term paper of his/her design. Each year the semester begins with students being very protective of their positions on social issues, and of their writing . By the end of each semester, though, every student I’ve had has created an incredibly moving, generous, and empathic piece of writing. And most tell me they will carry their paper further into their lives, whether through writing or by being engaged in the social justice issues that surround all of us. The most important goal of the class is to bring an understanding that social justice issues are not “over there,” or only relevant to “them”; rather, they are all around us and impact all of us. Additionally, that everyone has a role to play. This understanding and consequent openness in the writing happens, I believe, as a result of the seminar process and the comfort level and trust attained in the classroom. But mostly it has to do with our exploration of what’s going on in the communities surrounding Northeastern University, and our own place in the bigger picture. I like to say that, ultimately, this class is about empathy: the key to social justice understanding and the key to good writing.

Most of the growth I’ve seen in classroom discussion and on the page has a great deal to do with our visits with people and organizations working for social change in Greater Boston’s neighborhoods. In the past we’ve visited ROCA, a youth organization that works with the hardest to reach court-involved young people in Chelsea. This Fall we went to Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester, where we attended one if Boston’s premiere fundraisers (Men of Boston Cook for Women’s Health, where I was one of the “men if Boston”) and came back the following week for a tour and presentation by one of Boston’s most powerful community organizers, Bill Walczac, founder of CSHS. We also got to have an in-depth conversation with Meg Campbell, founder of Codman Academy High School (the only high school in the world located in a health center). Later in the semester we visited the youth outreach music program, ZUMIX in East Boston, where founder Madeleine Steczynski took us on a labyrinthian tour of recording studios where kids were writing, singing, and drumming their hearts desires (see video). We were also treated to a live stage performance by young people for their families.

Finally, as happens each semester, our most moving community connection, Janet Connors, whose son Joel was murdered, came to class. Janet speaks not only of her loss, but also about her powerful and hopeful work to bring peace by engaging in truth-telling efforts with victims and perpetrators, with the goal of making our communities more whole. It’s these exposures to the issues and to the amazing change agents working all around us, in every community in Boston, that invariably spurs at least one student (after each community visit) to tell me that his or her entire perspective has shifted: on poverty, race, class, and social justice. And each year, when I get through a semester’s worth of term papers that are well-written and deeply empathic, I too must confess that my life has changed.

Michael Patrick MacDonald, Writer in Residence, Author of All Souls and Easter Rising

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2010/06/29/city_youth_gain_400_jobs_for_summer/

http://tinyurl.com/yj42ros

Join us at Connolly’s on 45th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues (Times Sq) Manhattan
on February 24th from 7pm – 11pm.
Bands, Readings, Craic go leor!

In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture, exacerbated by the Abu Ghraib photographs, led him to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in those photos. Haunted by a history of addiction, a relationship with his unsteady father, and a longing to connect with his mother who committed suicide, Flynn artfully interweaves in The Ticking is the Bomb passages from his childhood, his relationships with women, and his growing obsession—a questioning of terror, torture, and the political crimes we can neither see nor understand in post-9/11 American life. The time bomb of the title becomes an unlikely metaphor and vehicle for exploring the fears and joys of becoming a father. Here is a memoir of profound self-discovery—of being lost and found, of painful family memories and losses, of the need to run from love, and of the ability to embrace it again.

Nick Flynn grew up on in Scituate and attended New York University. He spent six years working at Pine Street Inn. He has published two books of poetry, Some Ether, Blind Huber, a how-to-teach poetry book, A Note Slipped Under the Door (with Shirley Phillips) a memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Nation, The Paris Review, NPR’s This American Life and The New York Time Book Review. He has also received a number of prestigious fellowships. He was a member of the Columbia University Writing Project, which trained teachers and taught writing to young people. He currently teaches one semester a year at University of Houston, and lives in upstate New York.

http://codmanacademy.org/main/index.php

Just got back from a weekend of talks in Chicago, along with the McCourt Brothers, Malachy and Alphie…
Spent today, All Souls Day, visiting students at four Boston Public Schools which use All Souls (and uaually Easter Rising) in the classroom (Codman Academy in Dorchester, Boston Arts Academy, Fenway High School, and Boston Day and Evening Academy in Roxbury). I launched the entire Boston Public School marathon last week with an appearance at assembly for 150 Charlestown High School students who’d all been assigned All Souls. At Codman Academy today, students read passages of All Souls to me and talked about their personal connections to each passage, e.g. one young woman related to my outrage at the injustices in my brother Steven’s case, telling me — and the assembly of students and faculty — that she experienced similar rage at her sisters imprisonment on murder charges. I was so moved by the experience at Codman Academy that I announced that this would become an annual institution, making pro bono appearances in the Boston Public Schools every year on All Souls Day (and the following days), thus bringing the intentions of the All Souls Day vigils we once held in South Boston, into the schools (where they are as relevant as ever).

Tomorrow (Tuesday) on to East Boston High School to talk to 200 students who have been assigned All Souls.

Thanks to Joyce Linehan of Ashmont Media for volunteering as heroic driver, getting me to all appointments on time!

Just kicked off commemoration of 10 year Anniversary talks in Boston Public Schools, beginning w Charlestown High today… a school that lost a couple of its kids to violence in past year. Kids gave me an incredible reception this morning … packed the auditorium. Now gearing up for marathon of appearances at 5 Boston schools on Monday All Souls Day 2009 to commemorate 10 years of All Souls in the schools.

I’ll be appearing at the Boston Book Festival on Saturday October 24th, 3PM, in the Abbey Room of the Boston Public Library, where I spent so many days hooking school as a kid, staying out of the cold, and reading books.

Come by and say hello.

And on Friday Oct 23rd (today!) listen in to Radio Boston on NPR affiliate WBUR 90.9 in Boston for an hour show re Literary Boston. I’ll be on.

On the First Year anniversary of the passing of our dear Spencer Gates, I pulled together a Spencer-ish playlist from around the time I answered phones for the Mystery Girls (American Music ONLY) Radio Show on WMBR in Boston (in 1981 when I was 15). Americana at its BEST.

I Feel Good by James Brown
Watch video.

Cherry Bomb by Runaways
Watch video.

Trash by NY Dolls
Watch video.

Peking Spring by Mission of Burma
Watch video.

Better Off Dead by LaPeste
Watch video.

I Don’t Wanna Lose Your Love by The Emotions
Watch video.

Pull Up to My Bumper by Grace Jones
Watch video.

Black Flag, Depression
Watch video.

Moody by ESG
Watch video.

Misfits, Hybrid Moments
Watch video.

X
Watch video.

Sinatra, Fly Me to the Moon
Watch video.

Same All Over by Stranglehold
Watch video.

SSD, Get It Away
Watch video.

Jackson 5, Blame it on the Boogie
Watch video.

Dead Boys, All This and More
Watch video.

Unnatural Axe, medley of clips and songs from their DVD “You’ll Pay for This”
Watch video.

Michael Jackson — and the J5 — is probably the broadest (cultural) common denominator for a good many of the people currently on earth. Sadness and reflection are everywhere this weekend, as it should be. Michael is a huge part of who we are. Period. RIP.

Blame it on the Boogie

So lucky to have grown up in this era.

Papa Was a Rolling Stone