mostly nonfiction and bakersfield news | October 15th, 2009
Train Rides Through Museums And Mento Buru Criticisms
The San Joaquin Valley train winds along what seems like endless broken docks lining the southern shores of Suisun Bay. I wonder if each of their crumbled histories have been told.
The San Pablo and San Francisco bays have been left far behind when the gargantuan red-and-brown bricked C&H sugar cane factory comes into view. Many of its window are broken, though it’s full steam ahead for the factoryworks as men in hardhats can be seen on industrial streets far below.
What’s left behind of my strolls in San Francisco rainstorms, travels through the world of publishing, and gazing at tall buildings soon transforms into farmlands, dusty skies, and further remnants of a southern valley dust and rain storm.
For me it was a windy rainstorm on Market Street and the Lower Haight that soaked me down to my socks. Out the window there are flooded streets and an occasional car stuck in mud.
Just past Stockton I think, This isn’t so much unlike Bakersfield. Except for so much water being nearby. The delta runs into strings of grassland creeks. Small farmhouses and ranch houses look like little oases in the dark brown soil of the San Joaquin, giving way to miles of farmland, where broken tractors and farm equipment can be seen sporadically lying in fields.
I digress from my intentions, although I should add that I could never tell the full history of even a glimpse of what I just described. It’s too vast. As vast as the many waterways and sprawling grasses of the northern valley. Even swamp houses and swamp boats can be seen in some of the rivulets, like something you’d expect to see in a Louisiana bayou, not on a train ride through the valley.
Let me describe another journey, one I took a few days ago in the literary heart of San Francisco. It’s just a small portion of a larger story as I stood on Broadway and Columbus. It was the day of a Columbus parade to be exact. As the parade marched past, Italian-Americans ate pizzas and downed wine just down the street from the huge church where Marilyn Monroe once married Joe DiMaggio. The Blue Angels sailed overhead. They crisscrossed the sky belching red, white and blue smoke. San Franciscans cheered merrily. Some even cowered as the jets sailed directly overhead. Their screaming roars crashed in the skies, echoing like a never-before-heard mechanical thunder.
I made my way into City Lights — the bookstore made famous by the beat generation. Artist Gent Sturgeon worked the cash register. I’d met him the night before at the Green Arcade bookstore on Market Street where his pencil sketches lined a high wall in the back of the store. In City Lights I walked upstairs to the beat literature and poetry room where nearly every beat book known to man was being sold. I sat in a chair and looked out a window. Across an alleyway, underwear hung on a fire escape. In the room, brand new covers for Jack Kerouac books looked like fancy-made lit histories. I spied the book of previously unheralded beat writer, Diane DiPrima. She once signed a book to me, “To Mick.” Small misspelling. No problem. There were dozens of other beat books on the shelves. Too numerous to describe. The story is too vast for a commentary.
While in the room I wrote a few poems about wandering the city. I then walked downstairs to say hello to Sturgeon. I also had to use the restroom. “Only for you,” he said, leading me to a door that he unlocked for me. There was a bicycle in a small back room as well as rolled up posters, books, dusty bumper stickers. An old door led to a small bathroom. All I could think was, Kerouac pissed in here. A few days later, Brenda Knight, author of “Women of the Beat Generation,” said, “I saw Allen Ginsberg come out of there.” I was ecstatic. Might as well have said Plato had whizzed there to a philosopher.
After I left City Lights I made my way to the Beat Museum, which is across the street and next to a mural-covered alley that looks like a bent earthquake fault.
The museum itself is small and beat, with torn rugs on staircases, and a rickety room where a video of Jack Kerouac is shown. I sat in an old movie theater seat, imagining Kerouac there with me — his ghost at least. There were also small installations for some of the players of the beat literary movement. Short write-ups. Small photos among big poster-sized images. Like any museum, the words were short. Many people were left out. Probably not intentionally. Museums aren’t books, you know. And books aren’t articles. Each can be impactful in their own way. And like any experience, one must dive in at every angle to get as much of the story as possible.
There are still books on the beats being written. In fact, while in San Francisco I read about the beats in India. It’s a relatively new book about the 1950s and 1960s beats titled, “A Blue Hand” (2008).
This is where I stop in my digressions, because my intention for the article was never to write about my Bay Area experiences, but to address a problem: I hear I am being criticized for an article I wrote about the band, Mento Buru, a band with a history as rich and deep as some of the literary beats themselves (The article also appeared in Bakotopia Magazine, Bakotopia.com, Mas Magazine, Bakersfield Californian, Bakersfield.com).
I hear I left certain people out. Yeah. I know this. I did leave people out. Lots. Imagine how many would be left out if instead of an article, I put together a music museum piece on the nearly 20-year-old band.
Let me list a few items I would include…
Matt Munoz’ sax case: Covered with stickers, it has a nostalgia all its own as if it has been places. It has been places. I’ve seen Munoz walk with it. It’s black carcass holds musical secrets.
Matt Munoz’ whistle: See it lying in a glass case and imagine the sounds. It could stop traffic or symbolize a shrill moment within a rhythm.
Suspenders: An example of the 1990s in Bakersfield. A symbol of Bakersfield’s early wave of ska, though Mento Buru’s early years are actually a later version of ska in a global sense.
Photos of bandmembers: This is a graphic on an HD screen rotating through nearly 100 people. All of whom have played a part in the band. At least one is dead. Some like my boys are still young. Others have grey hair. They look like grandfathers. They could be.
A guitar: Doesn’t really matter whose instrument. Many guitarists have been in the band, rotated through. They have all played a part in furthering the life of the band and added their own musical nuances.
Matt Munoz timbales and a broken drumstick: There is a mannequin positioned above the instrument with a cool hat on a skeleton head. A photo nearby shows Munoz in full form, smashing the drums, cracking the bell, clinking the side of a snare. Like it or not, he is synonymous with the band. Without Munoz, Mento Buru would have ceased to exist long ago.
Listening center: Watch a video documentary. Put on headphones and scroll through a few songs. Do you care about the musicians? Or do you care about the songs. Here, you might even lose sight of Munoz. You’re caught in the musical moment.
Band history: People passing through the museum don’t have all that much time to read. They want to experience the music, the audio and visual tour and get a feeling of the past. Most individual stories about the band don’t matter unless they are brief stories that sum up the band’s collective experiences. The message is equivalent to two pages of written words. The highlights discuss a Central Valley blend of music influenced by a global movement in sound. Matt Munoz is mentioned as a leader in the Bakersfield community too. There isn’t even enough room in this sort of cool placard to mention Bakotopia. It’s an overview about music at best. Keywords are mentioned like “punk,” “Latino,” “horns,” and “Bakersfield.”
Wall photo history: Five giant black-and-white posters mark the history of the band. Each photo symbolizes a five-year difference in the band.
Wall of fliers: I hear Matt Munoz has kept every flier from every Mento Buru show ever. Imagine a wall of them as a giant poster. The originals are all kept in a hidden archive.
When I recently wrote that article about Mento Buru, Munoz asked if I would talk to some of the old members. I refused without saying so to his face. I politely took down names. Some made it into the article. But most didn’t. I figured any ex member could add to the story in online comment postings, or wait until future articles and writings came out.
A few weeks later, drummer Cesareo Garasa had a sheet of paper that held dozens of names. It was incredible. I remember when I was interviewing Munoz, he said, “When we do a Mento Buru book, you can write it.”
I sure hope he has a lot of money to pay me. That’s a hell of a lot to sort through. That’s what it would take to write the band’s history that’s like some mathematical equation dividing Bakersfield and music into the square roots of its own historical parts.
As I told Munoz, the article I wrote is just one of many that can tell the band’s history. Even the documentary I made is short, not even 20 minutes long. There’s a lot more I recorded and hours of material from the Munoz archives and my own that can probably be edited into a feature length film.
Let the critics criticize me for not including everyone. They’re in a rush to get their stories told.
Another digression: There’s a woman who helped write a book for Heyday Books recently on Colonel Allensworth State Park. She’s in her 80s and was born in the one-time utopian black community just north of Bakersfield. Her story is remarkable. It came at just the right time. But hers also represents many lost stories. She took initiative to write her own. Yet, if someone else wrote about such a history, she may well have been left out. That’s just the way history is. The axis is there. But it’s swirled about by countless stars and seemingly infinite stories.
I think people can add to music history by being a sort of educated cultural representative. Criticizing, arguing, blasting Mento Buru or my article is just inarticulate reasoning.
In the meantime, I’m going to keep imagining that Bakersfield music museum, because that would be awesome to see constructed within the monumental histories that make up the vast Central Valley.
Broken dock, trashed boat along Suisun Bay near San Pablo and San Francisco bays
Image by Nick Belardes
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2 Responses for “Train Rides Through Museums And Mento Buru Criticisms”
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That was fantastic, Nick. The symbolism, color, and message hit it on the head. Your story and video on the band means a lot to the band, and our fans from the US, to Mexico City (where much of my father's family live,) to France, Germany, UK, even Russia, and beyond have read the article and seen the video. I have the messages to prove it! Your talents are appreciated and we THANK YOU for taking so much time to complete such a personal project. Yes, there many, many more stories to tell – and I as a fellow journalist, respect your choice to "keep the story tight". We're not ready to retire yet….that's when the rest can come out. We just wanna play music, the fuel of our youth…Thanks, Nick! Matt
very nice… nick.