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.

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.

Interrobang Magazine: I understand you started painting later in life. What inspired you? What continues to inspire you?

Jim Fuess: I spent grades 7, 8, 11 and 12 in Rome, immersed in Medieval and Renaissance art history. We got to see the real art with teachers who treated us as adults. Because I’ve had essential tremor in my hands since birth I assumed that I could not be an artist. I was going to be an academic. When I was thirty, a lady friend left for Switzerland and gave me a pile of paint and canvas and said “play.” I’ve now been painting for 35 years. I love art. It’s what I do. I paint, I write about art, I’ve run the New Art Group (www.newartgroup.com) for 18 years and I curate art shows.

IM: Can you talk a little bit about your technique and how that’s developed?

JF: I work with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. Most of my work is abstract, but there are recognizable forms and faces in a number of the paintings. I am striving for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. I like color and believe that beauty can be an artistic goal. There is whimsy, fear, energy, movement, fun and dread in my paintings. A lot of my work is anthropomorphic. There is interaction between abstract forms and forms that represent animals and humans. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures and movements recognizable.

The painting technique involves using squeeze bottles with different viscosities of liquid paint, two brands of paint, and a number of interchangeable nozzles of different apertures.

IM: Many of your paintings a macro quality about them, the sort of abstraction that comes from viewing something either very close or very far away. Confrontation, Schizophrenia, War #2 — they all have this naturalistic feel, like aerial photography of a littoral zone. By contrast, “Evolution” looks like something you might observe under a microscope. Is that a conscious decision on your part?

JF: One of the fun parts of what I paint is that one painting can look like it is underwater or outer space. They can seem to be both a large or very small image. In Schizophrenia, the contrast is between the huge clouds overhead and the screaming double-white face in the foreground. Confrontation is what leads to the chaos of War. It seemed appropriate that they should be in stark, contrasting black and white.

IM: When you say “confrontation is what leads to the chaos of war,” are you drawing a line between those pieces (Confrontation and War#2)? Can we read them as a loose narrative?

JF: The series goes – Confrontation 1&2 – Attack of the Furies – War 1&2

IM: The names seem to help conjure the desired effect – “War”, “Schizophrenia,” etc., but others, like “Abstract 254″ don’t give any hints. Is there something specific you try to evoke in your pieces? Or do you take a more laid-back approach to how others view your art?

JF: I try to get the viewer to look into the images by giving them a hint, however some of the images are just abstract. This gets the viewer involved and slows down their viewing process. I also want them to have fun and play. Some titles come when the work is finished; some take a while. I was at a show when two older ladies looked at one of my images and said, “look at the two poodles” and by God they were there. They created the title.

IM: You’ve talked about form and movement, and I think there’s a very kinetic aspect to your work. A sense of motion, collision, accretion. How important is the communication of movement and tension in your pieces? And how much of your composition is planned at the outset and how much is spontaneous (and is that important)?

JF: I like movement, collision, or relationships between forms and images. It makes for energy. Some of the images such as the flower series are static. Some of the composition is planned but I’ve learned that a painting can take on a life of it’s own. I don’t fight it.

IM: Anything else you’d like to add?

JF: Over the past two-and-a-half years I have had the privilege of having over 100 images of my work in 73 print and literary sites. I would like to thank the literary community for their selfless, untiring and mostly unpaid devotion to their dream and their help to others.

IM: Thank you, Jim.

JF: Thank you.

- Interview for Interrobang by Christopher Curley

IM: Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself.

TD: I was born in Middleburg, Virginia. I lived there for most of my life. I went to Elon University, and that’s where I first really got into writing. I ended up changing my major from communications to creative writing. I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do after I graduated from school.

IM: Who are your favorite writers, your major influences?

TD: Oh, lots and lots of people. The Black Mountain poets, it’s kind of hard to be an American writer right now and not find John Ashbury to be an influence of some sort. But also the teachers at my school: Julie Agoos, Lou Asekoff, Marjorie Wellish. They are the ones pushing me right now.

IM: Your question poems, such as “Question to the Cyclops” have unique line breaks and indentations. What was the reasoning behind this structure?

TD: I’m a strong believer that poems should not only be lyrical in the musical sense, but that the poem should also dance to the music. Usually most of my indents are intuitive; they guide the reading, especially if read out loud, for myself or readers. It also helps toward an interpretation as well. As far as the Cyclops poem is concerned, I consider that to be one of my favorite poems that I’ve ever written. I say that because whenever I read it, I get something new from it. I think that’s one of the features of the short poem (newness with each reading), because you can be very dense without trying to be, or rather, saying too much. And that’s another reason for the movement on the page – it’s to give the word more weight.

IM: Is there anything specific that you would like readers to draw from your poems?

TD: I think I would want the reader to take the same thing from every one of my poems. Beauty, and joy, maybe a laugh. Something minuscule or enlightening, however fleeting it might be, toward some turn or emotional perception. It was never my intention to lead a reader in a particular direction by force.

IM: By force?

TD: Right, as in, I’m not trying to attach a bridle to the reader and lead them through the desert as a cowboy would his horse. I’d like  the reader to ride alongside me, to travel with me.

Read Dodson’s “Questions” series here, published in Interrobang!? Spring 2009.