Beta’s Substack

Oct 21, 2024 | andybeta.substack.com | Andy Beta

I first met Surya Botofasina at a Midtown restaurant back in the winter of 2017. Up until that point, Botofasina had been in his New York City hustle mode, whether that meant working in restaurants (like this one) or appearing in Boardwalk Empire. On that day, I was there to chat with him about his childhood spent at Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s ashram in California. That conversation became part of Luaka Bop’s ever-transcendent The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda set.

Jun 20, 2024 | andybeta.substack.com | Andy Beta

James Chance passed away earlier this week. Back in early 2003, Ryan Pitchfork asked me to go interview him at his apartment in the purgatory that is the Upper West Side on the occasion of a long-overdue CD box set. As a rather recent Brooklyn transplant, I got nosebleeds if I ever went north of the L and I was slightly bewildered to be this far uptown.

May 28, 2024 | andybeta.substack.com | Andy Beta

Marian Zazeela passed away last month. And J reminded me that Dream Lines, an exhibit of her drawings, was up for a few days more at Artists Space, so I trekked down to Tribeca for a chance to glimpse her work just in time. Wait, that’s not right. Time was Zazeela’s real medium; how you’re soaking in it, how you might glimpse light across a tiny slice of it. If you’re putting ink to a piece of paper, can you do it so as to trace the infinite?

May 23, 2024 | andybeta.substack.com | Andy Beta

As a family, we’ve only made it through about half of Cowboy Carter. B however –as is a 7 year-old’s wont– became obsessed with “Jolene.” I wish I could say that on our recent beach holiday we listened to hours of Balearic tunes (trust, I had a playlist of heavy hitters all ready to roll) but in fact it was more often than not “Jolene” on repeat, as B had traced it back to the Dolly Parton original. More Dolly hits followed.

May 13, 2024 | andybeta.substack.com | Andy Beta

At the turn of the 21st century, I moved from Austin to New York City. Did I think I’d still be clinging to such cement twenty years later? Not at all. When I left Texas, I had been writing for my roommate’s homemade magazine which gave me the still crazy notion to reach out to complete strangers and start prying into them and asking what makes them tick. That magazine never made it to another print issue, so these inaugural correspondences wound up elsewhere.