Though a native Italian, Alberto Arcangeli (top) creates music that bears a palpable Britpop influence, heavy on acoustic guitar, sprightly piano, gauzy vocals, and a sprinkling of Syd Barrett psychedelia. It’s also catchy as hell. For “Wheels and Love,” Arcangeli teams with Urbino artist Massimo Ottoni (below), whose delicate paint-on-glass technique perfectly captures the numinous longing of “Wheels.” Here, we cross the Atlantic for an e-mail exchange with Arcan- geli and Ottoni to talk about “Wheels”‘s pastoral inspiration, yet very 21st-century DIY genesis.

Interrobang?! Magazine: How did you two find each other for “Wheels and Love?”

Alberto: I was looking for someone to do the video of this song, but I didn’t want a standard pop video, I wanted it to be a “piece of art.” Something that could have a life of his own. I knew Massimo because he studied art in Urbino, where I was born and raised. I loved what he did there, but didn’t see him for 15 years, so I looked on the internet and I realized that he was still doing beautiful things. I sent him an email with the song and a few words about the project, and he liked it. Then he came out with the idea of a paint-on-glass animated video. That was just what the song needed.

!?: What was the inspiration/genesis of the piece?

Alberto: I wrote “Wheels and Love” in my garden, on a sunny September morning, with birds singing in the trees. Kind of a dreamy picture. I recorded the first half of the song singing and playing di- rectly in my mobile phone, in the garden, and then added the rest of the arrangement in my home studio. Actually, I don’t know why I wrote a melancholy song in such a beautiful morning.

!?: Musical influences?

Alberto: I usually listen to a wide range of musical styles and genres. What I care for is, by and large, “good music” vs “bad music.” I have an idea of what “good music” is, and I feel like good music must come out from spontaneity. You can improve your ideas, work hard on your songs, but you can’t fake spontaneity. That said, to me good music is: the Beatles, Thelonious Monk, The Beach Boys, Manuel de Falla, The Rolling Stones and many others … But I can’t deny that most of my inspiration comes from pop and rock music.

!?: How long did the piece take to develop, from start to finish?

Alberto: Not so long. I usually start with an acoustic guitar part, structure and arrangement in mind, and then I add all the other instruments: bass, voice, drums… Sometimes everything fits well from the beginning, other times I have to rethink all of the structure, because I feel that something’s missing… This time everything sounded right from the beginning and in a couple of days the song was completed. I can’t say that for the animation, though, it took Massimo a bit longer to do it!

!?: Massimo, you use a lot of heavy blues, whites, and greys (with even a direct nod to Picasso’s Blue period in your rendition of The Guitarist). What was your approach to animating “Wheels and Love”?

Massimo: I think that what characterizes my approach to animation is not the choice of shapes or colors, but the movement. After listening for the first time to “Wheels and Love” I immediately saw that the “movements” could be split in two parts: the first part of the song, more static, with minimal movements, and the instrumental part, where the music “melts” in a fluid flow. The timing of the movement of the objects is always my first concern, and is what defines the connotation of a clip within my animations. Secondly comes the color. I started to flip through books of art and felt that the first part should be dominated by whites, blues and greys, while the second part should have heavy warm colors, like reds and yellows. Picasso’s Blue period fit particularly well, that’s the reason why there’s a rendition of The Guitarist. Then comes the storyboard, which was pretty easy, because I just followed the lyrics of the song.

Concerning the paint-on-glass technique, I must say that I’ve always been looking for a faster and less expensive way of doing animations. The paint-on-glass technique has great advantages in terms of speed, and just a few drawbacks (i.e. the fact that once you’ve done a clip, you can’t go back or modify it. If the clip’s right, you keep it, otherwise you have to start from the beginning).

To listen to Alberto Arcangeli’s “Wheels and Love” and view Massimo Ottoni’s accompanying animation, visit http://interrobangzine.com/music-video

For more from Alberto Arcangeli, check out his second full-length album, Pop Down the Rabbit Hole, available on his website: http://albertoarcangeli.com

INTERROBANG?!: I was thinking we could start talking about how you got into photography — I assume it started when you were in England?
STUART WINDOW: Actually, no. In England I was always more into traditional art and graphic design. No photo editing, just straight creating in Photoshop and Illustrator. Composite images and abstract creations — building on layer upon layers. I used to try to paint, but I could never get my hands to do what my brain wanted to do. And I’d end up just destroying them later. And then I discovered Photoshop and the … [laughs] “History” tool. It’s like, “I just screwed up horribly – and it’s gone now.” It feels in a way horribly like cheating, an awful way to do things.

?!: It’s funny though – I definitely understand that feeling – but it goes back to the early days of photography too, or not the early period but the middle period of traditional photography.

SW: It’s incredibly powerful, the tools now. It makes it very easy for the amateur to start, but to create really sophisticated results still takes a lot of work.

?!: You can’t fake the eye.

SW: That’s the most important thing, especially photography going back to actual straight photography. I barely use Photoshop anymore, it’s all straight Lightroom, which is even more like an old photo shop. The beautiful thing about photography for me is that if I’m out and I’m going out specifically to shoot then I can find something in any situation that I find interesting enough to take a picture of. When I was painting or sketching it was a lot harder to get that inspiration.

?!: Do you feel that process-wise you always go out with an idea of what shot you’re trying to find?

SW: I try not to. I mean, there are times that I do. I’ll check surf forecasts, check the weather, where the moon’s going to be in the sky — and there is an idea but it never really works out that way. I end up getting distracted. You know, finding something more interesting on the way to shooting what I was intending to shoot. The beauty of living in southern Rhode Island is sunset, sunrise, there’s not much light pollution — compared to where I grew up — it’s a very pure atmosphere that creates some incredible colors, some incredible vibrancies that you don’t see in other places that I’ve personally been to. But then again, my other favorite place to shoot is London, which is just dirty and filthy and covered in grime and fumes and smoke, but it creates a different atmosphere, so you’re always getting something different within those two environments. The purity of one and the filth of the other.

?!: You want totally unmolested or –

SW: Utter filth. Right, and I guess the middle ground is nowhere I’d ever want to be. [laughs] Utter filth is probably a good way to describe a lot of what I shoot.

?!: You’ve told me before that you don’t particularly — you’ve not really gotten into shooting people. You’re mostly into doing landscapes or buildings.

SW: Landscapes or architecture, yeah.

?!: Given that a lot of people do shoot landscapes, buildings, things like that, is there a way that you try to set yourself apart, a point of view that you find yourself getting into that’s different than what you might find in say, a print book that would be sold to my parents?

SW: It’s a tough call. With the amount of photography that’s available to the public these days because of the Internet, it’s not a question of going to a bookstore and finding a book of prints down there. There’s great examples of pretty much everything around. So I try to ignore other [artist's work] as much as possible while I’m in a period of heavy shooting, you know? Obviously the influence is going to be there in back of my mind. It’s impossible not to take what you’ve seen into account, but it’s very important not to think about what makes a good photograph. I think, first off, “I really like this, I would really like to see this from various different angles.” And if it creates a good photograph that other people want to see from that? Fantastic. But it’s a very personal process originally. I’m shooting very much for myself.

?!: Growing up, as you did in London, and coming here and doing for instance the cover shot for Interrobang this year, I would call it a very “American”-looking shot.

SW: It’s Americana, it screams Americana. It reminds of the beginning of every road movie ever. It’s that tracking shot low down on the road and then coming up to the car.

?!: Do think that quality gives you a unique perspective, a more unvarnished look at America?

SW: I hope so. There are elements of American culture that I adore and there are elements that I still can’t understand.

?!: Like what, besides our politics?

SW [laughs] Besides your politics. I think, coming from London which is a big city, and it’s loud, it’s bustling, it’s bombastic, but compared to even smaller American cities London is very reserved. I didn’t really appreciate that stereotype of English people until I came over here. “Oh yes, we are.”

Taking shots of that American landscape and trying to keep a little of the reservation of an Englishman, essentially, in those photographs is kind of important to me, just because it’s not something that I think is in the general American personality.

?!: You try for a distancing effect, almost.

SW: Yes, that’s true. It’s interesting to me, because Southern Rhode Island is insular — everybody knows everybody. For me to find a spot I’ve never seen before is kind of exciting. It’s a challenge, and I want to make a part of where I live now more personal. Because if I discover it on my own, it now a little bit belongs to me, where everybody’s passed that road 30,000 times. I’ve never seen that before, and that’s exciting to me.

      What fool wrote, “Great God! I’d rather be
      a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn”?
      You dance The Time Warp one too many jumps,
      and bwumph! you’re torqued back here, to bogs and muck—

      to Danes in noisome leather and dank wool
      stinking of soot and sweat. How to survive?
      Today is Thor’s-day, an irony not lost
      on my thundered heart in need of roof and hearth.
      I’m known for zing in singing, strutting, words.

      But these oafish thanes can’t tell a rhyme from grime.
      My voice must bump, grind, solely to strong stress.
      Here, it’s alliteration—illiteration.
      So, for this sham of show-time do I shill old stuff?

Dare I risk remnants      from Rocky Horror?
Reprise a tale of terror      to titillate the folk?
But how to hero      the whole shebang?
What if I work      this Wulf guy in?
This git of Geats,      the guest we’re here to fete?
A mighty monster      I’ll make for him.
Perhaps a swinish Swede?      à la Sweeney Todd?
Or King Kong?      his carnage Vikinged-up?
Or chance it with Chucky      the choice of louts?
His grimace so gruesome      he’s Grim Doll
with a murderous mum      to match his villainy?
Grim-Doll—rather: Gren-del!      That grows . . . familiar!

      Are we ready to riff . . . Raff? Courage!
      Hands on your hips, ham it up for luck,
      and a pelvic thrust for pluck. Pull your knees in tight.
      Chin up, charge on! What’s changed, after all?

This means you are highly intelligent and have picked up an impressive and unique collection of facts and figures over the years. You’ve got a remarkable vocabulary and exceptional math skills.
—from a follow-up email offering a 15-page report . . . for a substantial fee

Butter your butt can call you Biscuit—hot
from the oven, primed to soak up grease and praise!
Clever and fleet with figures, you divvy up
the offer: only six bucks and spare change

(per page) for more, more, more. You cuddle up
to the first deadly sin and wish the quiz
had let you flaunt more pet words: wunjo, ilk,
rapscallion, sarisponda—to name but four.

Proud and valued—is that too much to crave?
And who can prize us more than someone selling
selkie skins to slip inside to Braille,
with newfound fins, the vocabulary sea?

Some claim that in this quiz all querents find
their niches, their nests fledged with flattery?
A pox upon their house—may the numbers rot
off its street address! May pustules blight

their diction, suppurate, and leach it dry.
Sincerity? We’ll take sweet talk, however
crudely slathered on. We’ll savor its ooze
on our digits, tally up each lick and suck.

First: the plastic quill pen could slip her grip.
(Poor Sanditon would never find its closure.)
Second: I might misplace the facts and quotes
the package quips when flipped to show its back.

[WARNING! CHOKING HAZARD. NOT SUITABLE
FOR CHILDREN UNDER THREE.] And finally,
I’d miss how resolute mini-Jane stands
at her bay window with its clear views

onto how our present age has lost all sense
that mirth can fit morality as snug
as her sole accessory (a writing tray
an inch away) could fit her other hand

now holding P and P. Yes! All this lost
if I stoop to break into her plastic parlor.
Even her least-loved Northanger Abbey
holds, as Jane might say, my approbation,

her umbrella term for sensibility
plus sense (a bond we scorn as nothing
next to love). Even in that slighted book,
we watch as her cool wit warms to its task.

We start with Cathy Morland’s shrink-wrapped brain
packaging the gothic frights and whims of novels
of her era. [WARNING! CHOKING HAZARD.]
Yet dimwit Cathy manages to poke

one articulated elbow joint
into her Aunt Jane’s ribs and wake her up
to empathy. What writer can ignore
her hero’s need to seek a stronger calling?

Miss Austen warms with—dare we call it love?
Jane into action! Bending mouth-to-mouth,
she breathes fresh words—ideas!—into that hole
beneath that bonnet trimmed with irony.

Austen can’t help herself—what she began
as a parlor game of wit and scorn to charm
a dearest sister now claims salvage rights
from the wreck we stood on shore to watch and jeer.

Instead, we witness a writer falling deep
in approbation with the task itself.
She cannot stop herself. She tidies up
flotsam and jetsam and pieces salvage back

to salvation. True, we’re entertained—still,
once her force breaks free of its safe box,
we’re conscripted in the starched dimity war
where wisdom wins the laugh to her side. [WARNING!]

Thank you for agreeing to chat! Tell about yourself — who you are, where you’re from, where you are now?

     As a writer, I think of myself as a Jill-of-all-trades, mistress-of-none. My publications include two mystery novels, some published short stories and pieces of flash fiction, and many articles in several fields, though I quit writing book reviews or theater reviews so I could reclaim my innocence and unfettered pleasure as a reader and audience member. My chief love is poetry, by far the most demanding genre in which I’ve struggled and therefore both the most challenging and most addictive one.

     To support my poetry, I research and write passages for comprehension tests or re-write text for subjects ranging from ionic soil stabilizers to the history of the toothbrush (its precursors were found with Egyptian mummies). I taught for twenty years at Humboldt State University in Arcata, CA but was not able to balance writing with teaching. A compulsive over-preparer, I watched teaching devour the time and energy for which my writing hungered. So now I am a feast-or-famine writer at last.

Do you have any particular writers or poets in mind that you count as inspirations or influences?

     Shakespeare, the dramatist rather than the poet, is my dearest wordsmith. I also love how the metaphysical poets, Marvell especially, celebrate the tackle and gear of everyday life and the tools for specific fields of science and inquiry, then elevate the ordinary to the spiritual. For several years now, the contemporary poet who most intrigues me is C.D. Wright. Her poetry leaves me breathless, throat aching from subvocally stretching after her lines.

One of my favorite aspects of your poetry is its inventive subject matter and voice. What prompted you to write about sloths, Jane Austen, or auditions at Hrothgar’s Hall?

     I am currently working on a chapbook I call The Seven Deadlies, and Sloth is the only deadly sin with an animal sharing its name. Jane Austen is my favorite novelist, though she was lost on me back in my literal, mathematical phase.

     Though I am fascinated with Old English and Old Norse or Icelandic texts for their own sakes, I wanted to introduce one to a present-day “epic,” The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and serve as maid of honor at their quirky wedding. I also have poems addressing or responding to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.” When we are young, we rebel against the “parental” texts. As we mature, we embrace our literary genealogy and work to find its relevance to our present lives.

You mentioned that you think of your poems as persona pieces. How do you find these different personas? What do they look like?

     In the nineties, I found myself squirming through too many poetry readings comprised of an unvaried litany of quasi-confessional or otherwise lyric poems. All that I, me, mine seemed so self-involved.

     A persona poem frees us to consider the Other, though we must be careful not to appropriate inappropriately the voices of other cultures, certainly. As a teacher of creative writing, I found that the persona poem widened the horizons of those young collegians who otherwise wallowed in confining self-importance. And the speaker needn’t be a human or mythical humanoid (e.g., mermaid). I have serious poems spoken by a toadstool, a ceramic cup, a music dictionary, an apple (THE apple, speaking to Eve), a multiple-choice quiz, and vinegar. While I have visions of these speakers, I usually leave room for the reader’s imagination to tailor how the speaker looks, tailor that to the reader’s needs and druthers.

     Another thing I enjoy about your poetry is the somewhat tongue-in- cheek word play (“Facts Curator”), the self conscious alliteration (as occurs in “Riff Raff). Some of my favorite lines from the former:

          “Some claim that in this quiz all querents find
          their niches, their nests fledged with flattery?
          A pox upon their house — may the numbers rot
          off its street address! May pustules blight
          their diction, suppurate, and leach it dry.”

Did you write these pieces intending them to be spoken? How prominently does the sound of words and the poem in general figure in your writing?

     All my poetry is meant to be spoken aloud, meant to be heard.

     The Beowulf/Riff Raff poem begins in loose blank verse but then self-consciously switches to the Old English convention of three alliterative words per line, two of them preceding the wide caesura and the remaining one following it. The poem ends in a blend of the two poetic conventions as poor Riff Raff struggles to fit into the Viking culture and its prosody into which he has accidentally “time-warped.” Alliteration anywhere is fairly unsubtle, as is much end-rhyme.

     In my other poems, I am more concerned with clustering sounds according to their wider families (e.g., fricatives, liquids). That effect is more subtle but is also pleasing to the ear. John Frederick Nims calls this “bond density.” I also like using vowel frequencies to stitch together a musical riff or to provide rupture and dissonance if these underscore what’s going on in the text. I am a firm believer in Pope’s dictum, “the sound must seem an echo to the sense.”

Though the sounds compacted in your poetry are great in themselves, the poems each have a consistent structure. When writing, do you think much about structure? How a poem appears on the page?

     Recently, I seem stuck in blank verse. Except for the Riff Raff poem, which is a mixture of conventions as discussed above, these poems are all iambic. The “Tongues” poem is in iambic tetrameter; the rest are in my personal flavor of blank verse. I usually run a poem through a contrasting structure when revising. Thus I put a blank verse on a free verse dietto to help me weed out phrases and words that function as unnecessary filler. Though I do have some syllabic poems, I chiefly use syllabics as a stage for boiling down a poem, reducing it to essentials. Then I let the iambs take over again if they get pushy about it. I especially like it when readers can’t tell I am working in blank verse. I like to believe that this means I am adhering to a structure that helps me tighten and refine but one that is not boringly predicable.

This is pure curiosity: do you have a particular time you choose to write? A place?

     I draft (first draft especially) as close to waking as possible, before the business of the day toggles on my analytic switch. While this may not be true for all poets, I have never understood how people could be creative at the end of a day spent in the analytic world.

     Setting? When I’m wrestling words to the paper mat, I don’t want other words cat-calling from the sidelines and distracting me from the muscularity of the bout. I work at a computer, which can be anywhere. The keyboard, for me, is freedom. Longhand is a prison sentence from which I cannot escape, through which words and ideas tunnel out and are lost forever.

She’s named for slæwð, the old, old word for slow,
and slow she is, slung from her bough of lunch:

a branch of cecropia—digestion
can reach from one full moon until the next.

Forget that Dante twined despair with sloth.
He never knew our plodding heroine.

Hung topsy-turvy from its branch, the vice
became the virtue of calm, deliberate care.

Get a hammock to sling you belly-up.
Lean back and slowly gnaw your green-shoot plans.

Bare your feet.  Consider your extra toes:
clutter from a life of wastrel haste.