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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I like Barack Obama and sense that he is a person of destiny. The present conservative agenda, which first gained a stronghold during the ascent of Reaganomics, is now a thing of the past. It is about time that the shrill and divisive practitioners of media yip-yap will soon be subordinated—along with outmoded management styles and corporate/consumer excesses.
The nature of American society and corporatism tends to mirror the personality and policies of the commander-in-chief. In Reagan we had a man in his dotage; in Bush I a wealthy elitist who was seriously out-of-touch with how common people lived; in Clinton and Bush II, there was slippage into adolescent behavior. But Obama is something else—a consistently virtuous, mature, sober, and responsible adult. The smart way his presidential campaign was run is a sign of what is to come. What the mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” was to the Clinton administration, “good judgment” will be to the Obama administration.
The four C’s—communication, connection, creativity, and collaboration—will rule. Obama brings style and substance, the likes of which the world stage has not seen before. Continue reading Analysis and Synthesis: Current Affairs and Presidential Legacies
If I were president and a highly ambitious, driven individual with my iron fist inside the velvet glove, how would I choose my staff and cabinet?
I would first turn to friends with whom I have a high comfort level, to smart and capable people who have proven themselves over the years and have remained personally and professionally loyal. Then, I would look outside, to a mix of new blood and veterans. I would want diversity in my administration, because I would feel that the different backgrounds, expertise, personalities, and voices would keep me grounded in reality: the mix would keep the dialogue fresh and intellectually stimulating. Working in concert, we would all be able to come up with innovative ways to deal with the challenges the country faces, to govern efficiently and effectively, and to move the nation forward with a progressive agenda.
This is precisely what Obama has done with his selection of Rahm Emanuel to become his chief of staff. It is something of a good cop-bad cop partnership, an extremely smart and pragmatic choice. As president, Obama should strive to remain above the fray and to continue the discipline and discretion that was the hallmark of his victorious campaign. He needs his enforcer, and Emanuel has worked with him in the trenches of Chicago politics, is a seasoned Washington veteran from the Clinton administration, a straight-talker, and is intensely loyal to Obama.
Obama’s election, in large part, is the handiwork of Chicago’s vaunted political machine, no longer just a machine but now a talented network of politicos and supporters that have made their mark in the Windy City. Obama’s Chicago-based team includes David Axelrod, the chief campaign strategist, a University of Chicago graduate and former journalist from the Chicago Tribune with a background in television advertising, David Plouffe, the campaign’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, and the queen of all media herself, Oprah Winfrey. Continue reading Obama 2008: An Intuitive Campaign
The crowds present at Barack Obama’s victory speech last night was the first time I have witnessed the most powerful manifestation of America’s collective subconscious. Bush and his cronies seriously underestimated the damage their policies have done to the population at large, so in psychic terms, yesterday’s election results represented a cleansing—the passing of the old guard and a step into the future.
Obama brought together a powerful coalition of voters that is coming into its own and supplanting the old order: ethnic minorities, youth, independents, and netizens. I didn’t have time in my 2,250 word essay that I wrote in under four hours to do more than touch on the significance of what will be the most important legacy of the Obama era: race. In the coming years, I hope to write more extensively on this premise.
In the year 2000, at the dawn of the new millennium, I was there as part of Census 2000—the nation’s first multicultural and multilingual census. I served on the regional media team on the staff of regional director Arthur Dukakis and as a press advance for the national director of the Census Bureau. For the first time in history, respondents to the census questionnaire were given an opportunity to self-identify their ethnicity. In the past, there were only a few boxes to check off: for example, bi-racial people had to choose between being black or white. In many ways, it was like choosing between one of your parents in a divorce case. In terms of identity politics, the decision was simplistic: if you were dark-skinned, you were black, and if you were light-skinned, you passed for white.
I would argue that Obama’s historic achievement would not have been possible but for the rise of multiculturalism in this country and its celebration among America’s immigrants and its youth. Continue reading Obama, Race, and Identity
I’m declaring for Obama in a landslide.
We knew the election results would either be a blowout or closer than expected. Nothing about the 2008 election season was ever middle ground or middle of the road. The 2008 election is nothing less than a battle for the hearts and minds of the American voter, a referendum on the future.
At 8:45 a.m. this morning, I arrived at Holy Family Catholic Church, in the 62nd district of Oklahoma, to cast my vote for Barack Obama. As I approached the church, the parking lot was filled to near capacity, as though a Sunday church service was already in session. But walking through the doors, the sight astounded me. There were about 200 people in line ahead of me, and it would be another 75 minutes until I was inside the auditorium to vote. I would learn that early risers who arrived to vote at 7:00 a.m. would have an even longer wait, an hour and a half. Early voting took place at the courthouse in our city on the previous Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—the line at the courthouse snaked even longer, with voters waiting an hour and a half to vote. My elderly father showed up at 7:00 a.m. at the Episcopalian church near his home and finished voting in no time flat.
I saw my congressman standing in line, presumably to vote for his own re-election. I was tempted to ask T.W. Shannon—an African-American man, a Republican, and a neighbor—if he would vote the party line or with history. Of the voters I saw, most were middle age or older and white. Fewer than 25% were people of color or college age or younger, and maybe 10 were soldiers in uniform. The time passed more quickly than expected as people engaged in friendly banter and an air of civic-mindedness prevailed. The retiree next to me complained that he hated it when news organizations projected the winner ahead of time; he felt it was a disincentive for people to come out and vote. Most voters arrived singly…there were retirees, farmers, older Asian women, college students, and African-American couples in line. Continue reading My Life in an Obama Administration, Part II
Today I vacuumed my mother’s floors, did four loads of laundry, emptied the trash, fed Seraphin the cat his last meal on earth, then ended the day by burying him.
There have been times in my past when people I cared about were taken from me because of unexpected circumstances. Simply, they disappeared from my life one day… An awful misunderstanding between two very close friends. A cutthroat power play in the workplace with collateral damage. But there was a reprieve: in the first case, I surreptitiously spotted the former associate—looking lonely and withdrawn—on board a subway train eight years after our acrimonious parting; and in the latter, a budding friendship continued long after the job had already ended.
Just like that. He was gone. I will never again see his furry face or feel him rub against my leg at my parents’ doorway. My heart is bleeding, like the liquid redness oozing from his mouth.
What does it say about the value we ascribe to life in a civilization that is on the verge of deterioration? The careless and unnecessary loss of life diminishes us all. The hit-and-run driver didn’t even stop. When I lived in pastoral New Hampshire, following a rainfall the country roads would team with wildlife…I always swerved to avoid hitting a stray animal—whether chipmunk or tiny frog. Why was this unwelcome stranger using our street as a thoroughfare? It is common enough to see dead mammals alongside the highways, but not in an established family neighborhood populated with children and pets. Continue reading Bereaved
The political momentum has shifted back and forth in the seven weeks leading to November 4. The bump following the convention brought a sense of renewal to the Republican party—and suggested a promising conservative talk show career for Sarah Palin post-election. The deepening financial and housing crises, which reared its head for much of the past two years, finally exploded into a full-scale, global, economic meltdown. Independents and disaffected voters began to make up their minds.
And this week’s coup de grâce: former Secretary of State and army general Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama—which effectively undermined his long-time friend John McCain even as it boosted Obama’s foreign policy credentials and qualifications for becoming commander-in-chief. My husband and I were watching Powell’s interview on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday when we suddenly had an inkling that an important endorsement was about to be announced. “He has both style and substance. I think he is a transformational figure,” summed up Powell’s influential blessing.
I suppose that now seems a good time to begin to speculate about my life and role at the dawn of the Obama era, but it’s still two weeks to go until the presidential election, and much can still go wrong. All I need do is recall what appeared to be a slam-dunk outcome a mere eight years ago when the winner of the popular vote by almost a half million votes lost the election by 5 electoral votes, with 1 abstention. Continue reading My Life In an Obama Administration, Part I
God sent us an angel. That’s what the preacher’s wife told me when I saw her today. Yesterday, she had been sitting at a makeshift table wondering how she was going to get the zip codes to mail business announcements to the hospital at Ft. Sill. I overheard her and volunteered to deliver her menus to a contact at the military base.
She was grateful for my offer and seemed eager to hear more, so I found myself making suggestions that ranged from ambience, to color palette, to lessons in product consistency, gleaned from my avocation as an East Coast foodie who is passionate about flavors, tables, and presentations. This new business run by a preacher and his wife has some of the best pit barbecue in Texoma—the southwest Oklahoma-north Texas region—that I had ever tasted. During family get-togethers, the mesquite-smoked meats—beef, pork, chicken, and seafood—had been perfected, and now the entire clan was working together to try to make a success of it. Continue reading God Sent Us an Angel
To answer your questions about the strange tango that informs the primary relationship/love story in the work:
Artist and Muse. I feel that people who are creative, receptive, are open to inspiration from various dimensions and influences. The artist is a channel, a conduit, a seer/mystic/psychic, if you will…who sees the future, reads souls, [...]
 activists, intellectuals, dreamers, visionaries, netizens
I had sent out a Quick Poll asking for feedback about the characteristics of my audience and writing style, and after many vibrant exchanges I can definitively articulate these qualities:
Audience: people who are intuitive (direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension), instinctive (visceral, spontaneous, unpremeditated), and/or aspirational (yearning; ambitious, desirous of success)
Writing Style: (note that these adjectives describe the writing, and not necessarily my personality…)
intelligent (a capacity and taste for the higher forms of knowledge; astute, clever, alert, bright, apt, discerning, shrewd, smart), illuminating (informative, insightful, enlightening), articulate (using language easily and fluently; expressed, formulated, or presented with clarity and effectiveness), holistic (emphasizing the importance of the whole and the interdependence of its parts), charming (pleasing, delightful, winning), intriguing (arousing the curiosity or interest of by unusual, new, or otherwise fascinating or compelling qualities), eclectic (not following any one system, but selecting and using what are considered the best elements of all systems)
What started four years ago as musings from a private blog, distributed via email in-box to serendipitously counteract the humorlessness found in the workplace, is going global. Here is just a small but representative sampling of people who read and share my posts: Continue reading Manifesto
I always had my eyes on the end game. Political events have borne me out.
Just before the flush of Super Tuesday elections, I e-mailed that the race for the Democratic nomination would be extremely close and that there was no guarantee of a Democratic victory in the general election, regardless of President Bush’s negative ratings. I wrote: “…a significant percentage of voters will not vote on the issues but will vote according to emotional comfort level.” Allowing for the strength of incumbency, my only error was in picking Hillary Clinton to eke out the nomination; however, I also declared that she would not become president.
I am an Ivy League intellectual and internationalist, and Barack Obama is my kind of candidate. Never before have I had the opportunity to vote for a candidate who so closely mirrors me and my beliefs. But Obama is also a generation ahead of his time—according to the U.S. census, twenty years from now, the minority population will achieve majority status in American society. At present, I fear the coalition of liberals/intellectuals/independents/ Millennials/minorities/netizens is not large enough to overcome the silent majority represented by middle America without the addition of crossover voters.
My affiliations are frankly elitist (Cornell, Harvard—Office of the Assistant to the President/Harvard Law School/Harvard Business School/Graduate School of Design/Faculty of Arts and Sciences—Boston; U.S. Department of State, U.S. Census Bureau; ABC News, CNN International, Hearst-Argyle) and I have traveled independently all over the world. However, I grew up in America’s heartland, and I understand the strength of the heartland’s ingrained values.
The election was Barack Obama’s to lose until the evangelical base became energized by the presence of Sarah Palin. Evangelicals are not just religious fundamentalists. They are also people like my neighbors and family friends who believe in God, country, and patriotism. Continue reading Political Predictions from America’s Heartland
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