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...
|
 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
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
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 [...]
StrangeTango.com: Life as Art is the personal website/blog of A. D. Tejada, a Filipino American feminist and first generation immigrant in America’s heartland who is Ivy League-educated, has lived in 7 major American cities, and has traveled through 35 countries on 5 continents.
At the nexus of art, culture, and politics, StrangeTango.com presents an innovative vision of a post-racial society.
The creative collaborators are multicultural and multigenerational; a Pulitzer Prize finalist/George Polk Award winner and an Emmy Award-winning arts and culture television producer have been involved from the conception of the global platform. Launched just five months ago, the site was featured in a presentation on innovation, creativity, and leadership in a university business curriculum.
Hope Webby and Oprah notice us… Continue reading At the Nexus of Art, Culture, and Politics
 Me, at the time I began writing Strange Tango.
The destinies of a pantheon of gifted Cornell graduates unfold through the internet.
After my niece had graduated from pre-kindergarten several years back, she started summer classes at vacation bible school where she saw Luke, a former classmate who had left the class to be home-schooled in anticipation of his father’s deployment to Iraq.
“Do you remember me?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he shyly replied. “I do.”
The weeklong pattern of rainy and gray New England weather inspired me to remain in my cocoon and to revisit my early adulthood. Once a person has entered my orbit and been a significant part of an era in my life, a bond of shared experiences is created. There is history between us. I carefully choose the people I invite into my space, so relationships have been of long duration. I can recall only one significant disappointment.
Prompted by a vivid dream, I sought to reconnect with someone who once mattered to me. “We don’t want any contact with you at all,” he replied. Still, I persisted. How could someone with whom you have had a symbiotic bond—a karmic connection—change, or age, so much? He had such love of beauty, how could charm and grace be replaced by fear and inflexibility?
Or had he simply forgotten me?
For the next nine months, I sought openings that would reveal the answer to me until, finally, I released the beautiful memory of a dear friend to the stranger he had become. My dream was indeed prophetic: his heart was dead inside.
Other reconnections have had far happier endings. Continue reading Speak, Memory
 Moulton Brown's New Age Traveler kit
New Age Traveler is an excerpt from Millennium Muse, my book of narrative nonfiction, essays, and observations.
My favorite travel agent booked me for automatic electronic upgrades to first class, so on two round trip legs between Manchester, New Hampshire, and Chicago, air travel was sheer bliss. On the second trip, I gave my seat to my father, who had joined me. He was pleased with the personalized service, comfortable seating, and the meal of fried rice, lechon (pieces of roasted whole pig), and wine.
I fly first class as an upgrade whenever possible, usually paying $50 per leg for an upgrade ticket, but complementary is always nice. I’ve done well cultivating longstanding relationships that offer value-added benefits with products and services.
I’ve traveled to at least thirty-five countries on five continents. These days, it’s leisure travel for me, with stays at some of the finest hotels in the world. However, my travel habits have remained the same. Unless I’m on a cruise ship where I don’t have to unpack more than once, I keep things simple. Continue reading New Age Traveler
 Our home in Windham, New Hampshire Nest is an excerpt from Millennium Muse, my book of narrative nonfiction, essays, and observations.
Except for the house in Somerville, which Joseph bought with our best man at our wedding as the first real estate project for flipping, I have always located the properties and negotiated the purchase of the houses we’ve called home.
I found the three-family Victorian in Savin Hill, a gentrified neighborhood of Boston. We placed an offer the day after I saw the dwelling in a real estate ad and was inspired to drive to the other side of town to see the property. The house looked like a castle. It had a turret, and the exterior had light yellow, vinyl siding. The property was minutes away from the Savin Hill train station, close enough so that I could cycle to the beach and ocean and smell the sea breeze from my porch in the morning.
We stayed at Auckland Street far longer than we ever planned. This was in part because Joseph’s parents lived in one of the units. Each day, his father took the train to Chinatown where he would read a newspaper in Cantonese and socialize with his elderly friends all day before returning home for dinner. Continue reading Nest
“The next step is sharing her vision of cyberspace as the next frontier in the literary arts. Says Tejada, “For my collaborators and me, Strange Tango is a labor of love and a global platform for original and passionate creativity.’” ~Raphael Seligmann
Welcome to the world of Strange Tango. Conceptually speaking, the blog before you is an illustration of my thought processes─multilayered and cross-referenced, in a matrix pattern─that places the visitor in the navigational cockpit. Content is layered throughout the website: hover and click on images, text, and links. Continue reading The Key to the Strange Tango Kingdom
My transformation from glamorous to spiritual was years in the making. When I worked for other people and had my own source of income, I purchased heirloom quality items to leave as a legacy for my niece. My curatorial sensibility was developed by taking courses in the liberal, literary, and fine arts at the largest university in the Ivy League and by being mentored by a professor of Japanese culture and comparative literature who is the director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. As a result, over time, my senses became sharply honed and more finely focused until I developed a distinctive voice, style, and sensibility that I call neo-Zen.
Friends and strangers call me psychic, or highly perceptive, but I say it’s a matter of cultivated attunement. Continue reading The Neo-Zen Sensibility
“Although these days I tend to travel in style, there is still a part of me that relishes the idea of roughing it and traveling lightly–to soak in stripped down, sensory experiences.” New Age Traveler by A. D. Tejada, in Millennium Muse
The Strange Tango personal website is a living and evolving art installation in cyberspace—the innovation is the first of its kind in how we marry art and style, substance and content. My collaborators and I are savvy about new technologies…this global platform was built via a remote process and is regularly updated and upgraded several times a week. The six of us are based on both coasts and in America’s heartland, so our discussions generally take place through email loops or Facebook online chats.
The musings on art, self-expression, communication, and connection are thoughtful and relevant. Currently, we are working on the design for New Age Traveler, a chapter in my book, Millennium Muse. When completed, the art installation will be housed on the experimental space on the website, also called Millennium Muse.
The Strange Tango project excites me, in particular, because of the intellectual and creative synergy between us across distance—it’s the quality and energy of pure thought. Continue reading New Age Traveler: The Creative Process
|
|
Life as Art
Showcase
Edgy and Ethereal
Connectors
Millennials
Multicultural
Neo-Zen
Art
Nest
Food
Travel
Green
Home
Follow Strange Tango