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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 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
During the summer months, I love to cook on the grill beneath the portico by the kitchen. My family enjoys al fresco dining among the lush garden and water fountain as appetizing aromas waft through the air. For a week, June 3-9, I prepare lunch or dinner on the grill. My flavor profiles are global—combining Mediterranean, North African, and Asian influences. Meals cook in 10 minutes or less, and prep and clean up time is minimal.
 Skewered Beef Strips Day 1: Dinner is a pile of skewered beef strips marinated in sangria, soy sauce, garlic powder, olive oil, and a touch of salt. The meat cooks in 3-7 minutes and mushrooms are done in about 10 minutes. Using sangria saves extra steps…and you can imbibe while grilling if there is company. Continue reading Meals From the Grill
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 [...]
 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 [...]
 The salon at our operatic home in Windham, New Hampshire, an exurb of Boston.
StrangeTango.com’s literary/artistic aesthetic is at the nexus of art, modern culture, and politics. As a global platform for emerging voices, innovation, and creativity, guest columnists write about what they’re passionate about—that celebrates and commemorates their life, voice, or purpose.
An organic and evolving art installation in cyberspace, our work-in-progress installation is the “Millennium Muse” webpage, using an innovative, nonlinear music matrix set to Daniel Brunelle’s music and my memoirs.
Since StrangeTango.com was launched 7 months ago, out of almost 2 million results, we’re #1 in search for our keywords on Google and Bing; the website has been submitted for a Webby Award and was featured in a presentation on innovation in a university honors business curriculum; and we’ve been downloaded around the world, largely through my more than 2,000 Facebook Friends added in the past 5 months. Continue reading Intriguing Interviews and Guest Columnists in 2010
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
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