Don van Vliet, better known as Captain Beefheart, was one out there visionary artist and poet. His exploration of the outer cosmos of blues and R&B in his musical persona meant he was no stranger to the strange byways and back alleys of the subconscious mind. Like Sun Ra, the guy was from another planet. I started watching this documentary about his life and times and he was clearly tortured but touched with a mad genius.

The life of the artist knows many roads but generally the ones less traveled are the more fruitful, and more dangerous. Many artists seek commercial success by playing the curator/networking game and generally it seems if you buck the system nobody much cares about you. Don van Vliet was a rock star who turned to painting. His name was already well known in avant-garde circles. So the back door path haha can sometimes work if you have the chutzpah and dexterity to jump between the craggy rocks on high. Beefheart was a slippery fish, trout mask replica and all, and he moved from Los Angeles to Mojave to an isolated studio in Northern California pulling off one magic trick after another. Like William T. Wiley and other California artists, Van Vliet was a trickster. It's taken me a long time to plug into his signal because I felt he was a con artist, a liar. But now that I'm moving closer to him I see his power was full on crazy free jazz style rebellion.

Don Van Vliet shared his gallerist, Michael Werner, with Georg Baselitz, and the two artists are similar in the way they push boundaries and seek maximum return for minimum effort, so to speak. Van Vliet brought his dadaistic approach to language and let it morph into abstract landscapes inhabited by spirit beings and animals. His Ice Cream for Crow is a purely American hybrid of African consciousness melded with Native American mythos by a West Coast middle class white kid hippie freak who barely dodged all the pitfalls of drug burnout. Baselitz on the other hand is a crafty Eastern European survivor in the West driven by a mad need for success against the post-Nazi environment of go-for-broke “liberated” Germany. He also almost flew too close to the sun, but unlike Van Vliet, he always had his eye on the prize of major success. In that way Baselitz is more like Warhol and Don Van Vliet is more of an outsider artist in the right place at the right time. It can never be repeated and that's part of the analog magic of it all. For this is all pure analog culture and our understanding of it is fading fast. Silicon Valley is another kind of crazy California magic, but of the black variety. I sense a Sith lord on the throne in it's shades of surveillance and censorship. Beefheart and Baselitz, despite their sexism which should be noted but is of their time, were both white magicians in the end seeking liberation of consciousness. Let's pray those days return. Is there any place for Abstract Expressionism today? If anything can save us, diving into the glass onion between shape and shadow, between sound and language, is the place that might set us free, if enough people seek the edges of what can be known rather than settling for what is given to them. For we will only have a revolution if we are ready in our minds and spirit to be revolutionary. Don van Vliet and Georg Baselitz are examples of that spirit.

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