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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 StrangeTango.com celebrates a milestone first birthday. 15 years was the timeframe between my first interactive multimedia class and the launch of StrangeTango.com: Life as Art. In the 1990’s, the Boston University College of Communication was one of the first colleges in the nation to teach a course in new media technologies. I was one of the students in that inaugural class taught by Bill Lord, a former Vice President of ABC News and ABC News Interactive. Some classmates were building websites using html while I documented my family history as a cd-rom, Balikbayan, which means return to the homeland in a Filipino language. This was an exciting time, Continue reading Team Tango Birthday
 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
 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
We went through several iterations before coming up with the name for the website: Mermaid and Sun…Muse and Tango…Millennium Muse…among them. The act of naming a personal website is like choosing a baptismal name—signifying a new life—for yourself. So I sent out a Quick Poll to gauge the fleeting impressions left by prospective titles.
One response, by Alan Hoffman in San Diego, read my soul.
”I’m more partial to Strange Tango, because it speaks directly to the inter-relationship and inter-action between you and your subjects (the Tango); the adjective “Strange” serves to modify the noun not in the traditional sense of “strange” but rather to signify that it’s not about the actual dance.”
So StrangeTango.com became the name of my personal website—now it’s official!
For me, anything sustainable has to originate organically. Here’s my backstory:
When my Harvard Business School experience ended in May 2004, I kept myself busy by co-founding the Harvard Administrative Fellows alumni association a month later. Simultaneously, I started The Cool Community, the precursor to my popular e-mail communiques, which would morph into the book of essays, memoir and musings—Millennium Muse—and the cyberspace platform for my writings and experiential work Continue reading It’s Official! StrangeTango.com
 An almost vertical incline leads to the temple, El Castillo, in Chichén Itzá, Mexico. Even the unwitting taking of a single pebble will cause an endless amount of trouble. Unknowingly, the pebble is a “touchstone,” a portal to vivid dreams, the ancient world, the collective subconscious.
(I can almost hear the reader saying, “Don’t pluck the apple! Don’t take the stone!”)
The beauty of Strange Tango is that you’re never sure if the action is in the artist’s head or if it is her reality…given the language of the oeuvre, it’s as seamless as a South Sea pearl. The story is deceptively simple: but when when you figure in the symbolism of anthromorphological objects—whether the classic “kiss” found in magical realism or the psychoanalytical meanings of figures and actions strung together in her technicolor dreams, or even the carefully-chosen gifts the artist bestows upon her beloved—you have an entirely different level of subtextual interpretation.
I wrote the first version of Strange Tango when I was still in my 20′s. I put it away for more than a decade and went on and did other things with my life…the life experience and maturity that would inform my work toughened what was then an extremely sensitive and fragile psyche. Also, at the time I began writing Strange Tango in the 1980’s, interactive multimedia hadn’t yet made its popularized appearance in our global order. My mental processes and imagination have always been in a matrix pattern, which allows me to pick and choose from an eclectic assortment of influences without consideration for a linear order—this is one reason why I plumbed so many disparate areas and endeavors like my favorite Renaissance figure, Leonardo da Vinci…what appeared to be job-hopping was simply collecting a portfolio of experiences that was meaningful to me…and today, ironically, it’s relatively rare that anyone stays in one job/career for life. It took the pre-eminence of interactive multimedia to make my thought processes ubiquitous so, yes, I had to wait until the world changed and my timing was right before I revisited Strange Tango, and revealed its existence and my early aptitude for being a writer. Continue reading 7 Levels of Meaning in the Epistolary Novella
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