Untitled Document
StrangeTango.com is a multilayered art installation in cyberspace…the documentation of a life in three iterations: as a film treatment, a book, a blog.
“What remains as documentation of a life?”
Strange Tango haunts the boundaries of digital streams and visceral storytelling, where pixels and dreams flow together.
Video, reportage, and nonlinear narrative meld in captured moments from the life of A. D. Tejada, artist - traveler - citizen of the world.
Life is a strange tango...
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 At the Lawton Farmer's Market, a truckload of melons from Daniel's Farm in Chandler is a glorious sight. Before I returned to the southwest Oklahoma town where I grew up, I lived in seven major American cities and traveled throughout the world. When possible, whether in Boston, Bangkok, or Dakar, I would look for local outdoor markets to buy the freshest and most alluring fruits, vegetables, and flowers in season.
 Succulent peaches. During the summer months, I practically subsist on just-picked tomatoes, peaches, melons, and baby squash from the Lawton Farmer’s Market. On Wednesdays and Saturdays from May through November, local growers bring their vegetables, fruits, honey, and flowers to the parking lot of the Comanche County Fairgrounds. Continue reading Lawton Farmer’s Market
 My personal copy of this important new book by Charles Ogletree. Professor Charles Ogletree of Harvard Law School has written the much anticipated and definitive book on the high-profile case involving the arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge on July 16, 2009. The incident is of special interest to me: I’m privileged to have worked with my longtime friend and mentor as well as with Professor Gates during my appointment as a Harvard Administrative Fellow.
THE PRESUMPTION OF GUILT
The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America
By Charles Ogletree
Praise for Charles Ogletree:
“Charles Ogletree…has seized on the very public arrest of Professor Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates to teach Americans important lessons about the Constitution, the continuing relevance of race in America, and the ease with which an incident can escalate into a major event. Ogletree was there, knows all the participants, and has written a brilliant book from which all Americans can learn.”
—Alan Dershowitz, author of The Trials of Zion
Shortly after noon on Tuesday, July 16, 2009, renowned professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested by Cambridge police sergeant James Crowley on the front porch of his own home. The incident ignited a media firestorm and heated debate about race in America, as images of the MacArthur Fellow and Harvard professor in handcuffs splashed the front pages of newspapers around the country. In THE PRESUMPTION OF GUILT: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America (Palgrave Macmillan; Publication Date: June 22, 2010; ISBN: 978-0-230-10326-9), renowned Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree uses the incident as a lens through which to examine the complicated history of race, class, and crime in America. Continue reading THE PRESUMPTION OF GUILT: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Race, Class, and Crime in America
 My mother's secret courtyard garden that I created for her. A secret courtyard garden for my mother reminiscent of the tropical paradise where she was born, a spot where she could sit outdoors in the shade and inhale the familiar fragrances that remind her of her native home. I always give creative gifts, and this one was designed to fill the senses.
Because my mother is from the beautiful Visayan islands of the Philippines, I wanted the natural and authentic look of the provinces. Beauty there is to be found in the rusticity of orchid plants decoratively hanging from trees or peering from a container wedged into a wall, in the harmony of ocean breezes, blue sky, lush greenery, and colorful flora. Continue reading The Secret Courtyard Garden
 - Still life composition with Armani.
To live life as art, attunement and scale are the essentials, not the resources of a financier or industrialist. Many images of beauty that I create—my handiwork—cost nothing at all, or very little, and yet, I live life to the fullest.
I have always appreciated the thought and effort cosmetics companies place in designing and marketing their products. I began buying Armani makeup when the line was first launched about a decade ago. Over time, I retained the empty containers until there were enough items to make a collection, or a still life composition. I assembled the objects on a wooden tray I acquired on a trip to the Philippines decades ago.
Now, when I see and touch Pearl Veil, Fluid Sheer 9, my favorite Smooth Silk eye pencil 4, or Lip Shimmer 9, the objects are a touchstone for memories. I remember Tim Quinn, Giorgio Armani Cosmetics’ Celebrity Face Designer, who magically fulfilled my request and transformed me into a tawny Mediterranean goddess, and the high-maintenance appearance and lifestyle that was a part of the high-profile life I once led in a major urban capital.
In this way, my sanctuary and surroundings may be likened to a personal museum of my past, present, and future.
Do I miss the past? No, I sensed it was time to undergo yet another personal metamorphosis. I realized, quite insistently, that I was focused on eternity and unanswerable questions. And art is the portal.
 My Neo-Zen garden. Throughout literature, the garden has represented sanctuary. Voltaire’s world-weary Candide retired to cultivate his garden, contented with the philosophy of living a simple life, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” The gardens I have cultivated in our various homes have always been contemplative spaces, an escape from the stressors and tedious demands of modern life, where people are quick to defend their positions rather than to actually communicate with one another. There is something essential and fundamental about being a part of nature and losing one’s self in the sensory delights to be found among what is green, vital, and growing.
At one time, I lived in and near Boston and was on a career track. My gardens in a pastoral exurb of Boston occupied more than an acre of abutting conservation land that could never be built upon. When I returned to my hometown in southwest Oklahoma, I simplified my life and made the transition from activism to artistry. Relocating to the Southwest region of the country, we moved to the city where my gardening space in a carefully manicured, prestigious neighborhood occupies a quarter of an acre, more an outdoor room than a garden to tend. Somehow, the metamorphosis seems appropriate given the austerity, the insularity, of our political and economic times.
Although I relinquished space, variety, and stimulation, I gave up little else beyond scale. My Neo-Zen sensibility is, at heart, my way of focusing on what is important, meaningful, and relevant to me. I create beauty through various media—writings, images, food, and gardens—as a portal to transcendence; within the constraints of scarcity, sustainability is attained through optimization. My garden lends itself to the elaboration of this elegant concept and worldview. Continue reading My Neo-Zen Garden
In commemoration of President Barack Obama’s Proclamation of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, I am honored to reproduce, with permission, a moving speech on diversity by a proud Filipino American, physician, and officer. Colonel Rodrigo Mariano, M.D., is Board Certified as a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine Physicians and is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians.
As of late, the term diversity has been bandied about as if it were a new idea, based on future census demographics. However, the idea of diversity is long steeped in the history of the American identity, as people left their homelands in search of freedom: religious freedom, economic freedom, political freedom. This country has been the beneficiary of many migrations of people from different lands at different times, from the pilgrims seeking religious freedom, to the mass immigrations from Europe at the turn of the 20th century, refugees from war-torn countries from around the world, and those coming to seek a better life for their families. This country builds its strength on its most valuable asset: the diversity of its people, their ideas, their innovations, their energy, and their common vision as Americans. As the world becomes more competitive, smaller, and fast paced in the 21st century, it is that same diversity of ideas, innovation, and consensus built upon diverse ideas that will prove to be an advantage for American leadership in the 21st century.
Since the Census of 2000, the demographics of the United States shifted from the uniformity of the Great American Melting Pot to the real complexities of a nation whose population is reflective of the world at large. Continue reading Leadership of a Diverse Workforce
My currency is creativity, ideas, and innovation. For me as a writer/artist, the process of writing a book is the process of creating a work of art. Given the upheaval in the publishing industry and the cross-platform promotion of content—in a world that is becoming increasingly impermanent—I can foresee a time when the concept of a book, as we know it, takes on the form of a treasured gift or an evocative work of art that is forever kept and enjoyed around the world as an heirloom or legacy.
After I wrote Strange Tango, an epistolary novella, I felt I had achieved the goal I set for myself as a literary writer and that there were no books left for me to write. In fact, the manuscript has been called a “masterpiece.” But in 2007, I wrote Millennium Muse, which was inspired by the ideas, essays, musings, and memoirs that flowed in and out of my in-box. The top international literary agency in Boston reviewed my manuscript for publication consideration and suggested I place my writing online. I was an unpublished author and, despite my extensive personal, educational, and professional networks (two years later, I would add more than 2,000 Facebook friends in five months), I had no personal contacts that were literary agents and publishers who would facilitate the path to publication for me.
I took the literary agency’s advice to take my productivity online. However, I do not believe that conventional publishing conceived of how far we would take the traditional concept of a book and give it multiple layers of dimensionality: in essence, we created StrangeTango.com: Life as Art—the first literary and conceptual art installation in cyberspace. The personal website was submitted for a Webby Award and was featured in a university honors business program’s presentation on leadership, creativity, and innovation.
As many as twenty personal friends—including six creative collaborators across the country in the fields of filmmaking, photography, music composition, website design, high tech, and writing—worked with me to bring StrangeTango.com from concept to reality. The people behind the personal website/blog include a Pulitzer Prize finalist/George Polk Award winner, an Emmy Award-winning tv arts and culture producer-reporter, a film director who worked on Batman Begins, a Ph.D. in English literature, a composer-electronic musician whose band was featured at SxSW, a multimedia artist and developer, a Greenhills Award winner from Harvard Business School, and a former Cornell University Trustee-Harvard Administrative Fellow. Continue reading Social Anthropology / Portrait of ~A. as an Adolescent
 Michael Pang, Cornell '11
As a former Cornell University Trustee—and part of an alumni network of 7,000 volunteers—I have connected possibly hundreds of Cornellians on my personal Facebook page. Guest columnist Michael Pang, Cornell ’11, came to my attention when we friended each other on Facebook through a post about the Cornell Asian Alumni Association reunion, co-chaired by two of my longtime friends, Kent Sheng and Eugenie Shen.
A government major, Michael was an Organizing Fellow with the Obama for America campaign in 2008; he is an active member of the Hong Kong Student Association and serves as a committee director for the University’s first collegiate Model United Nations conference. Michael is a second generation Chinese American from Brooklyn, New York, and is the first person in his family to attend college. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School, or Brooklyn Tech, which together with Stuyvesant High School and Bronx High School of Science is one of the top specialized high schools in the New York City public school system. Continue reading The Issue of Asian American Representation
 Photograph and pens made of exotic woods by Joseph Yu.
My husband, Joseph Yu, has always impressed me with his brilliant combination of artistry and technical precision. His background includes architecture at Cornell University and e-business at IBM. He also repairs and maintains his own vehicles. Then, just two weeks ago, he took up a surprising hobby, in addition to fishing.
This is Joseph’s photograph of the finely crafted pens he made out of exotic woods such as rosewood, padauk, purpleheart, bubinga, maple, cocobolo, makore, and zebrawood, as well as acrylic.
He used some of the maple reserved from the kitchen cabinets he designed and built several years ago in our new construction home in Windham, New Hampshire. This is the estate-sized property I lovingly chronicled and photographed in Nest.
Joseph has previously designed, and renovated or finished, the homes we’ve owned and lived in, including: a two-family in Union Square in Somerville, Massachusetts, near Harvard University; a turn-of-the-century Victorian within walking distance to Boston Harbor in Savin Hill, Boston; and a New England contemporary in pastoral Windham. He has also built furniture in his workshop for our homes.
With the introduction of his artisan pens I tell Joseph that, at last, everyone can own an original piece of his unique artistry.
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