Todd Chandler recommends sitting next to strangers

 

Name: Todd Chandler
Age: 36
Hometown: Wellesley, MA
Job description: Director, musician, artist, educator
Upcoming projects: Premiering Flood Tide this fall for Empire Drive-In with Jeff Stark as part of the 2010 SJ Biennial, Dark Dark Dark releases Wild Go on Oct. 5, finished recording Fall Harbor's second album (Meet Me At The Water) with Ryder Cooley
Select links: Official site, Kyle McDonald's photos of DDD scoring Flood Tide (flickr), "Sailing Down the Hudson River on Junk Sculptures: The Movie" (L Magazine), Flood Tide Kickstarter, "'Swimming Cities' Docks in Manhattan" (NY Mag)

Describe your current state of mind.

Soft focus.

What were you like as a child?

I didn't walk until I was almost 18 months old. Before I was able to walk I could speak in complete sentences...crawling around asking, "When do we eat?".

What's your fondest childhood memory?

A 1982 early August evening in Massachusetts. It's about 85 degrees outside and just beginning to cool down. My skin smells like chlorine and I'm lighting sticks on fire in the woods. It's almost time for dinner. My father is barbecuing chicken in the backyard and the television is on, at the head of the dinner table.

You took a bus from New York to San Francisco. What advice would you give to someone traveling cross-country?

Pack food. Stretch. Sit next to strangers.

If you didn't live in New York, where would you want to live?

Upstate New York.

What's the most difficult thing you've ever had to do?

Fail a student of mine when I was teaching 12th-grade English.

What's one thing - tangible or intangible - that you couldn't live without?

My sister, Lauren.

What's the best conversation that you can remember?

My 96-year-old grandmother and I just had a really interesting and unexpected conversation about white privilege and cultural assimilation.

What's your greatest fear?

Getting sick and debilitated and not being able to take care of myself.

What qualities do you admire most and least in people?

Most: Empathy, integrity.
Least: Ambition.

How would you handle a broken heart?

The last time my heart was broken I had a marathon session of high-stakes Scrabble with old friends. I lost and had to wax a big patch of my thigh.


What skills do you wish you had?

I wish I could fix cars, were fluent in Spanish, understood music theory.

What's the best meal you've ever had?

On this tour the best meal was breakfast at a friend's in Providence -- they have a kind of weekly breakfast cafe in their house. Eggs, pancakes, homemade tempeh and vegan sausage. But, I'm often having the best meal I've ever had. When I'm in New York I like to cook with ingredients from Caputo's market on Court Street in Brooklyn: fresh radiatore pasta, puttanesca sauce and mozzarella di bufala.

What music are you listening to now?

Time and Temperature from Columbus, Nathan Salsburg from Louisville.

Reading?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers is being passed around the van. I'm 40 pages in, but someone else is reading it right now. I'm in the middle of The Age of Orphans by Laleh Khadivi, and rereading Sam Shephard's Motel Chronicles. Also, anything by Janet Frame.

What's the last film that you saw?

I just saw Clash of the Titans in the theater. It was terrible -- not even good-terrible. Just bad. But we had a few hours on tour between Lexington and Louisville and it was a treat just to sit in the theater and watch something. I'm pretty good at suspending judgment while I'm in the theater -- no matter how bad it is, I can usually enjoy the experience. I also watch films on the iPhone in the van. David Lynch says something like, "It's such a sadness that you think you've seen a film...on your fucking telephone! Get real!" I hear what he's saying. I don't really want people watching my films on their phones either. But at the end of the day, I like to watch movies and if I've got several hours in a van of course I'm going to watch a movie. I lie up in the loft and throw a black t-shirt over my head and have my own little personal theater experience -- right now I'm watching Wim Wender's The American Friend with Dennis Hopper.

Photos by Todd Chandler/Top: Harrisburg, PA; 
middle and bottom: Los Angeles, CA

Which films/filmmakers have inspired you?

Braden King is making a film called HERE shot in Armenia that I'm very excited about. Ava Berkofsky, the cinematographer of Flood Tide, is working on a companion project to HERE, a series of lyrical and abstract video postcards she shot last year in Armenia. Also: Brent Green's Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Jia Zhangke's Still Life.

What's your idea of success?

Following through.

What's one thing that you would change about the world?

I guess at the most basic level I'd say that I would want to see a massive scale power shift in which governments and corporations were supplanted by community-based systems of mutual aid. But that's simplistic and kind of ridiculous to just throw out there like that. This just doesn't feel like the place to get into it.

What's your idea of happiness?

Working with friends to make things. Good pizza. Far Rockaway in July. Snowstorms.

Where do you go to be alone?

The beach.

What time do you go to bed?

Between 1 and 3 a.m.

And wake up?

Between 8:30 and 9 a.m.

What's your preferred mode of transportation?

Bicycle. I've been driving way too much lately.

What do you think is overrated?

Youth. Success. Popularity. Power. Scenes.

And underrated?

The Midwest.