Biography. Art Criticism. For more than seventeen years, Don Van Vliet made music under the name Captain Beefheart. When he walked away from music, he turned to his other art and is now an internationally known and collected abstract painter. RIDING SOME KIND OF UNUSUAL SKULL SLEIGH looks at the phases of Van Vliet's musical career through the lens of the new, ecological theories of mind which were emerging at the time Captain Beefheart and the Magic...