I am not a man that slumbers peacefully. My irregular comatose states are plagued with an endless menagerie of horrors that my brain, to its credit, takes great pains to obfuscate from my waking mind. But fragments of my nocturnal trauma find their way into the day; all the more terrifying for the half-remembered haze through which I see them.

Strangely, the soundtrack to many of these nightly horror-shows is Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny Farina, and has been since I was but a wee sprog. When the first, all-too-familiar squealing strains of the song begin to echo through my somnolent skull I know, with a bone deep dread, that the night has terrors in store. In spite of this song’s inextricable association with my inability to truly rest I find it soothing; as if the beginning of my nightmare soundtrack indicates it’s time to relax into the comforting powerlessness of absolute fear.

As an aspiring artist obsessed with the theme of duplicity I am entranced by this piece by Paul Moschel. All too often in my attempts at making inroads to what I would consider a display of artistic acumen I forget that simplicity can reveal far more than detail, and the work of Moschel serves as a strong reminder. The basic linework of his pieces in concert with the strange dead-eyed girls that feature as subjects in his work touch the horrible places inside my brain I’d hoped to forget, and present a take on the youth of today that many of us have often broached yet never had fully quantified.

Paul Moshcel [Artist’s Site : HugoStrikesBack : Vulgare]

I have been deathly ill these last few days, and as a result have experienced some of the best fever dreams I’ve had in a long time. In relating one of these dreams to a friend I was informed that it sounded exactly like the video for Nick Cave’s The Weeping Song.

It’s important to note here that in spite of having gone from wee gothlet to full blown goth-denial over the years I hadn’t actually seen the video for The Weeping Song. Oh sure, I’ve heard it countless times in smoky goth clubs, but more often then not I was preoccupied with laughing into my drink at the slow motion seizures occurring on the dance floor to actually take note and look it up later.

After watching the video I was surprised by how closely it paralleled my dream, while missing the junkie mullets and copper coiffed sidekick in the video the dream I had was nearly exactly what you see above. Either Nick Cave (circa 1990) and I (circa brain-boiling fever) share a brain (which isn’t much of a stretch considering the pharmaceutical soup pumping through his veins at the time) or the idea of a sitting in a tiny boat in the middle of a vast, dark ocean wearing a suit and tie simply appeals to the disturbed.