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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 The New Age Mona Lisa...is the iconic image of Strange Tango. We chose a portrait called hypnotic and alluring. “The methodology requires intensity coupled with bouts of stillness to cull the pithy metaphor.” Strange Tango, the epistolary novella, page 39.
Strange tango is my metaphor for life.
I could have blogged about gardening…foodie reviews…travel…culture…or politics. But I decided the website and blog space should be about life—which encompasses all of the above, its synthesis, and more.“What kind of niche is that?” a publisher or an internet marketer might ask. Life is so unwieldy and overwhelming. True, but the unifying theme is the uniqueness of my voice and perspective. If a person or an event has been a part of my life, then that is incorporated into my life history. As an individual and as an artist, I fully inhabit the present, and my gaze is always towards the future.
My past, however, is commemorated as a memory.
During the artistic process from idea, to development, to production, launch, and beyond, my collaborators and I encountered recurring questions, which are answered here for their insight into the Strange Tango mission.
1) What inspired the title “Strange Tango”? Question asked by Sangita Chandra, producer/reporter, WCVB-TV 5, Boston.
The title intuitively came to me in a flash of inspiration two decades ago. Like Athena emerging as a complete figure from Zeus’ head. I was smiling at the time…the name conveyed precisely what I had crafted my imprint to be:
Tango: “passionate,” “sensuous,” “romantic,” “elegant,” “stylized,” “intricate,” “distanced,” “a universal dance.”
Strange: “means that there’s a twist,” “subversive,” “slyly satirical.” Continue reading Cull the Pithy Metaphor
A confidential debriefing I wrote was once published in a popular, online college paper without my permission. I was deeply chagrined since my incisive insider’s perspective singled out an actual person in an otherwise hardworking and respected group.
My illustrated Facebook posts, July 16-21, 2009:
…for the 75% of my family and friends who are not and will not be a part of Facebook’s social experiment…
But the publisher was someone I admired, a multiple Emmy Award-winning, former broadcast news executive who was the creator of Nightline with Ted Koppel. As hard news credentials go, it would be hard to top my graduate adviser’s impervious credibility. He felt my insight would help others, he explained to me. And it was hard to reason otherwise; furthermore, he hadn’t changed a word of what I had written, not a single edit.
I realize that influential people read my writing…for several years, a Pulitzer Prize finalist repeatedly encouraged me to write a blog, and a high-profile talent agent in New York City had sent me an email commenting on my “cogent analysis.” Conservative communities and friends may find my comments disrespectful. Still, I was one of the first student leaders at my college to take a stand against apartheid in the 1980’s, and I retain that moral compass and obligation. Continue reading Facebook Experiment, July 16-21
At the beginning of my journalism career, I was the AAJA/New England National Board representative as well as the AAJA National Scholarship Chair at UNITY ’99 in Seattle. It was at this joint convention of several thousand journalists from AAJA, NABJ, NAHJ, and NAJA that I met Sree Sreenivasan in person at the Gala Scholarship and Awards Banquet. (I met then-unknown fellow Filipina, Michelle Malkin, at UNITY as well, but it was Sree who stood out for me.)
I don’t believe he remembers the introduction, but Sree was well known to me as a co-founder of SAJA since a number of my friends were South Asian journalists. Even then, Sree was notable for his sense of engagement and the posts he broadcasted on the somewhat limited forums of the time.
When, as a newbie, I opened my first social media account in June 2009, Sree was one of my first Facebook friends. Each day, I would look forward to the provocative posts and quality links he shared on Facebook and Twitter, and I found myself giving some thought to the comments solicited.
So, given the recent buzz surrounding StrangeTango.com in media circles (disclosure: AAJA convention co-chair, Sangita Chandra, is a longtime personal friend, former colleague, and adviser to StrangeTango.com), I felt it was only fitting that I devote a post to the hugely popular Professor and Dean of Student Affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism known—like Oprah—by his first name. Here are some of Sree’s recent links on Facebook, followed by my comments. Continue reading Sree
A shared memory of Senator Ted Kennedy by Paul Redmond. Paul is my former neighbor in pastoral Windham, New Hampshire; his late father was a former Massachusetts congressman who worked alongside the Kennedy family.
“I just woke from a sound sleep to the impending news from CNN of the loss of [...]
 The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention in Boston, August 2009. I was present when multimedia began to take over the world. Around 1994, interactive multimedia and internet technologies—new media—made its way into higher education. One of the first journalism schools to teach classes in this emergent field was the Boston University College of Communication.
William Lord, a former Vice President of ABC News and ABC News Interactive, headed the program. I was one of Bill’s first students. For my multimedia project, I produced a CD-ROM, Balikbayan: Return to the Homeland, and for a graduate project, I wrote and produced a documentary on cyberspace and education, Cyberspace@COM.
The first Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention I ever attended was in Boston, in 1997. As a newly-selected Hearst-Argyle Fellow in television news, I remember that Sangita Chandra, a past fellow, and I helped Carol Fulp, the administrator of the fellowship program, set up equipment for a workshop by WCVB–TV 5, the Boston ABC affiliate.
I also attended the 1998 AAJA convention Chicago. A year later, at the UNITY ’99 convention in Seattle, I was the New England chapter’s representative to the National Board and the AAJA National Scholarship Chair–the same year AAJA/NE won chapter-of-the-year honors.
These singular memories are very meaningful to me. Fifteen years later, I would launch a personal website, StrangeTango.com, during the 2009 AAJA convention held at Boston’s newly reinvented Seaport district. It took 15 years for interactive multimedia technologies to become sophisticated enough for my collaborators and me to design and build a personal website that expressed my multifaceted vision of life as art. Continue reading It’s a Multimedia, Multiplatform World
My Muse Room is in the Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I’ve alluded to The Muse Room in my dispatches and postings. It is a room on the top floors of the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I first checked in, the reservationist told me the room was special.
Indeed it is—stunning [...]
Peter Jennings, ABC News
Peter Jennings was my inspiration for choosing graduate school in broadcast journalism over law school. Peter’s former executive producer basically recruited me, over lunch at the Harvest in Harvard Square, to enter the master’s program at the Boston University College of Communication.
Although I left television news for [...]
StrangeTango.com was featured by the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) Convention News Project’s mobile journalism unit at the convention in Boston, August 12-15! Here’s the embedded video interview up on YouTube (you can tell that I hadn’t gotten much sleep for two weeks…). Kudos to journalism student Jackie Watanabe for her reporting. ~A.
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 Edgy and Ethereal I would describe myself as a hybrid: a literary stylist and a formally trained broadcast and print journalist inhabiting the same body. Not all of the entries in the Life as Art blog are 3,000 word essays and commentary. Some days, the visitor may see an image that conveys 1,000 words, or a 4-word mantra/haiku, such as: “Inhabit a stolen moment.”
For five years, I have been distributing my writing through a private channel, my email account. There were literally hundreds of entries from which to choose to populate the blog. I winnowed the offerings to feature a representative sampling of my work and my world, the Strange Tango cosmology—ranging from narrative nonfiction, to political analysis, to Neo-Zen style, to food recipes.
As we neared the completion date for the website, I felt that social media would be the best way to simultaneously pre-launch StrangeTango.com and to get in touch with all the high school friends who wondered what had become of me all these years. I opened a Twitter account several weeks later.
In the space of less than two months, my writings had migrated from email…to Facebook…to the personal website/global platform. Facebook forced me to be very economical with words; it was also highly addicting, and I must have accumulated about 100 posts during that time. Since 75% of my family and friends are not on Facebook, I would copy the posts, minus the photo and video links, and send them out as an email blast. Eventually, I may post the Facebook entries on the blog.
Visitors have commented on the iconic image of the website, the New Age Mona Lisa. Fittingly, the concept is a contemporary take on Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci’s legendary muse since the personal website exists as a paean to beauty, art, passion, and inspiration. Continue reading Dream: The Strange Tango Story
Day #2 at the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention in Boston. I realized we had achieved a milestone when someone I was just introduced to excitedly exclaimed, “So you’re Strange Tango! Everyone is talking about it!”
At the UNITY: Journalists of Color convention in Seattle in 2000, I was the AAJA National Scholarship [...]
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