Cull the Pithy Metaphor

“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."


2) How much of the website is based in fact vs. fiction? Follow-up question asked by Sangita Chandra, producer/reporter, WCVB-TV 5, Boston.

Everything on the blog is my life, my reality. Nothing is fiction. As an essayist and belle-lettrist, I have a distinctive writing style that is very fluid and lyrical, so passages may read like fiction. In Bereaved, I give a blow-by-blow description of the sudden death of our family cat and my internal state of grief. I also honor our pet’s life by commemorating the love and the life lessons Seraphin taught me in his brief time on earth.


3) What is it about? Question asked by Jennifer 8. Lee, New York Times reporter and author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles at An Evening of Hope and Good Fortune at Harvard University.

The concept is the documentation of a life—capturing sensations and perceptions, letting the details build up to a 360-degree portrait of the artist—and, by extension, of our world. The tag, "life as art," is about learning to find beauty in the places you travel, the people you meet, and the thoughts in your own head…


4) What are you selling? Question asked by Farland Chang, CEO and founder of WorldBizWatch and former NBC News correspondent, at a Cornell University alumni networking event in Washington, D.C.

We have nothing to sell; my vision is merely out there—its value unfolds in the visitor's life.

A moment of peaceful reflection in the visitor's busy, over stimulated day…a thoughtful and welcoming space on the web…pithy and quotable mantras to ponder and apply to life.


5) What is the point of the website? Question asked by many.

To showcase a distinctly contemporary aesthetic—a visual look and prose style for the emerging neo-Zen movement ushered in with the election of President Barack Obama and a new, more collaborative political and economic order.

The neo-Zen aesthetic is encapsulated in our own example: a way to live life to its fullest in a complex, complicated, and often hurtful world by savoring the evanescent, embracing change, and appreciating the small things and daily activities that accumulate to become a documentation of one’s life.


Visitors are often surprised to learn that the personal website is the work of six collaborators, not just one individual. Having provided the vehicle for my immensely gifted collaborators to unveil their talents for the world to see gratifies me. I front Strange Tango because I blog on the website and post on Facebook, http://bit.ly/Strange_Tango_FB_fan_page, pretty much on a daily basis. But think of the Rolling Stones. Does Mick Jagger have a solo album? Was the rock group ever called Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones? No such thing. All the members are rock stars in their own right.

For Brian Saffold, whose first job in the film industry was working on the atmospheric blockbuster, Batman Begins, his dream is to have an agent who can facilitate a career as a Hollywood filmmaker. It would be nice for this consummate professional to not have to struggle for resources...his video for Strange Tango is pitch perfect.

Daniel Brunelle—whose evocative compositions for the website, Tango for Diving Birds, and Lover’s in Reverse, have visitors already asking when a Strange Tango soundtrack will be released—likes to mix things up...it is all about freedom of artistic expression to him. Dan would own up to wanting the fun projects and the Hollywood lifestyle just because.

Marlee O’Neal longs to achieve her full flowering as an artist in her own right and to work with creatively fulfilling projects, her own included, that feed her spirit. Her dream is to have a beach house on the ocean, with views of the waters that inspire her.

Chris Barros and Raphael Seligmann are two of the most altruistic and selfless souls I have encountered in my lifetime...they are primarily involved as my knights in shining armor because my longtime friends understand the purity of my motivations and have always been very protective of my ethereal and hyperperceptive nature.

Me…I want to share Strange Tango with the entire world, to push boundaries and tell a story wrapped around the innovative concept of literature as an art installation in cyberspace...anything else is just more good karma.

Hopefully, we will all reach the promised land together soon.


Message left by a visitor to the Strange Tango website:
“I have been exploring the site and am just mesmerized at what you have done. It is an amazingly multidimensional work of art!”

Sree

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 became acquainted with 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.

Sree: What do you think of this list? - 25 things journalists can do to future-proof their careers: http://bit.ly/Oc1S4 (by Chris Lake)
Audrey Dolar (A. D.) Tejada: ...strangely, before I ever read Mr. Lake's article, we had already incorporated most of his suggestions into our collaborative project: StrangeTango.com. This from a trained broadcast journalist who cut her teeth at World News Tonight, CNN International, and WCVB, the flagship Hearst station in Boston. Prescient...I saw the writing on the wall when new media appeared 15 years ago and made the right transition to crafting our own unique brand: life as art... ~A.

Sree: READING: "How Facebook Can Ruin Your Friendships" by WSJ's Elizabeth's Bernstein: http://bit.ly/uCpzL ["...we're breaking a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends."]
Audrey Dolar (A. D.) Tejada: Thanks for the post, Sree...Before I joined Facebook a few months ago, I used email exclusively to connect. I’m tolerant…I never asked to be unsubscribed from friends’ boring emails and chain letters. Therefore, in the rare instances when people asked to be removed from my targeted listserv, I also removed them from my Christmas card list and, therefore, from my friendship circle. ~A.

Sree: READING: "Online, your private life is searchable" by LAT's David Sarno: http://bit.ly/N9iyP (didn't know about snitch.name)
Audrey Dolar (A. D.) Tejada: Thanks for this quality link, Sree...I had written an unpublished essay, "Speak, Memory," about how frighteningly easy it was to use the internet to fill in the gaps in the lives of friends from college to the present day. Gary Guzy, Paxus Calta (nee Sky Flansburg) and Joey Green...all became public figures. I decided to launch my personal website after a local newspaper article and photo of me and my dad on my first day in the first grade in Oklahoma surfaced on the internet...! ~A.

Sree: MUST-READ: The case for SLOW communication - an essay by Granta editor John Freeman in WSJ: http://bit.ly/3EkTUd (strange to post it here, of course)
Audrey Dolar (A. D.) Tejada: ...it's our manifesto, too, on our new website, Strange Tango: life as art... ~A., StrangeTango.com


Re-post from Facebook:
"Rahilla Zafar congrats on your shout out:
@sreenet: Sree Sreenivasan is an incredibly popular J-school professor at Columbia who tweets political and media
http://current.com/1k5tm4cTop 100 Twitterers in Academia // Current
Source: current.com
These 100 Twitter feeds come from admissions office, student affairs departments, professors, athletics departments, and more, bringing you information about…http://current.com/1k5tm4c"

Guest Room: A Memory of Senator Ted Kennedy

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 clan.


"I just woke from a sound sleep to the impending news from CNN of the loss of our nation’s most beloved statesman...Edward Moore Kennedy...friend of the average, champion of the poor, unfortunate, and unrepresented, but more importantly the discarded and forgotten constituents of our world.

His passing has crushed anyone who has hailed as a native from the Bay state, the U.S., or who has benefited from his unwavering duty to public service. It was expected, yet still heart breaking. He was a great patriarch to his family. He alone remained as the legacy of our nation’s most unexpected and painful chapter in the loss of his brothers.

My family had the privilege of working with him, his brothers, and the Kennedy ideals. We had the privilege of being Kennedy Democrats. We will never forget the impact of his and his family’s influence and duty to our country. We have lost an incredible American."


Paul Redmond
Windham, NH

It’s a Multimedia, Multiplatform World

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.

The creative collaboration’s advisers include a Pulitzer Prize finalist in public interest reporting and an Emmy Award-winning television arts and culture producer/reporter based in a major media market. Early in the morning on the first day of registration, a journalism student in the AAJA Convention News program interviewed me about StrangeTango.com. Jackie Watanabe conducted and taped the interview with a cell phone as part of the mobile journalism training. The interview was later edited with additional clips, uploaded on YouTube, and placed on the AAJA website.

With AAJA’s return to Boston, Sangita co-chaired the convention. Carol is now John Hancock’s highly influential Vice President for community relations and corporate philanthropy. Carol was also the co-chair of Boston 2004, which brought the Democratic National Convention to Boston and gave a global platform to an electrifying keynote speaker, Barack Obama.

New media, as well, has advanced in startling ways: what was then a technology that mainstream media seemed reluctant to embrace is now ubiquitous in newsrooms around the globe. I have culled some of the best take-away information and cutting-edge concepts gleaned from my attendance at five panel presentations on digital multimedia.


Audience Engagement and Development
Doris Truong, Copy Editor, Style, The Washington Post
Joshua Benton, Director, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University
Angie Goff, Reporter, WUSA9, Washington, D.C.
Vindu Goel, Deputy Technology Editor, The New York Times

How can multimedia platforms develop and engage an audience? The panel offered valuable tips on the use of social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, to drive traffic to a website. Mobile technology and crowd sourcing were brought up as low-cost ways to outsource labor.

Doris introduced the panelists and moderated the discussion. Social media is the new SEO. Vindu emphasized that social conversation is the way to build audience, that there is an etiquette to using social media. Blogging is the most powerful tool used in evolving stories and breaking news, from on-the-scene Twitter updates to links in the blogosphere.

Twitter acts as an echo chamber, and users tweet to be re-tweeted. The Nieman Journalism Lab has more than 13,000 followers. Joshua estimated the Lab sends out 15-20 tweets per day, re-tweeting the day’s news later in the evening. Followers can also ask questions via Twitter. He suggested using crowd sourcing, like an open call, as a way to tap the collective wisdom of the audience and to cultivate audience engagement.

Accordingly, journalists now act as curators for readers, sifting through what is important and finding the best sources of news and information.

Angie offered specific examples of how social media helped her build a loyal following as a traffic reporter—Angie’s Army—to gain leverage within her workplace and to transition into money-making franchises such as a clothing line and jewelry. Do not expect to go viral right away, she cautioned, keep it simple by using Facebook and Twitter as initial, cross-media platforms.

More tips for successful social media networking:
- Increase your search engine ranking and traffic
- Gain credibility in the eyes of the reader
- Foster transparency in reporting
- Jump into the social conversation to build reader loyalty
- Respect your audience, do not tease with refers – they will go elsewhere
- Share link love
- Use your actual photograph in your profile
- Have a unique voice, use social media and audience engagement to build community

Recommended resources:
http://twittercounter.com/ - Twitter follower statistics
http://bit.ly/ - a simple URL shortener


Creating a Web Site: A Quick Guide
Leezel Tanglao, Online News Producer, KCBS 2/KCAL9, Studio City, California
Elizabeth Jia, Multimedia Journalist, WUSA9, Washington, D.C.

Our collaborators and contributors took a year to create StrangeTango.com. Elizabeth and Leezel showed how easy it is to build a professional-looking website in no time, without any knowledge of HTML, Flash, or JAVA.

Online templates and tools, such as WordPress and Blogger, allow the user to set up a website or blog with little trouble. Elizabeth stressed the importance of physical location and reliability of the web host/server and noted that websites can be customized with themes, widgets, auto-updates, and by adding embedded videos and Twitter plug-ins.

Leezel and Elizabeth advised the audience to anticipate emerging technologies and to print hard copies of important documents as back up.

Design tips:
- Avoid clutter
- Use images wisely
- Pick smart website navigation
- Interactivity keeps a blog relevant
- Attribute by linking to original work with hyperlinks
- Use RSS feeds
- Promote your website on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, send email blasts
- Place your website URL on your Facebook profile

Recommended resources:
http://www.gettyimages.com/ - royalty free images
http://www.drpic.com/ - crop and modify photos without PhotoShop
http://www.vimeo.com/ - HD quality video sharing site
http://www.slide.com/ - create slideshows for websites


Doing It All: Tips for Working on Multiple Platforms
Niala Boodhoo, Multimedia Specialist, The Miami Herald
Victor Merina, Senior Correspondent/Special Projects Editor, Reznet
Ram Ramgopal, Executive Producer, CNN

Today’s journalists must be versatile enough to write for a convergence of print, broadcasting, and online media. This panel demonstrated how to take your writing, and your career, to a multiplatform level.

Print and broadcasting differ from online journalism in one fundamental way. In the former, the journalist can repeat and rephrase questions, or use these techniques as part of the pre-interview. Multimedia, on the other hand, requires planning and forethought. Broadcasting on the online platform has many of the same elements as a performance art piece. Whether long-form or short-form, the emphasis is on looking at stories in a new way.

In Ram’s artful and playful television packages for CNN, the tone was natural, conversational, and authentic—the narrower the focus, the stronger and more tightly focused the story. His advice was to keep the tone conversational, to use natural sound to capture a slice of life, and to know when less is more: cut in and get out.

Victor shared his comprehensive checklist for creating unique, one-of-a-kind online features.

- Try different things
- Seek a voice, appreciate the details
- Provide perspective—history, context, and culture
- Consider the language, hear the silence
- Be a reporter, whether it is a personal piece or an essay
- Write with authenticity, not arrogance
- Have a sense of place and of character
- Make the personal universal
- Make a point, and a clear one
- Use powerful imagery, what resonates
- Give telling examples, details, and anecdotes
- Use contrasting descriptions
- Use a quote that matters from a person who is meaningful
- Employ good structure and organization
- Have a recognizable tone to your piece
- Have a distinctive style or approach (experimentation, individualization)
- Emphasize good, interesting writing
- Finally, move the reader along—think story, not therapy

The media is always looking for new sources of unique and interesting content; aggregation sites are becoming increasingly influential. Twitter is especially useful as a community-building tool.

In answer to my closing question, “What is the next wave in online media, in telling a story?” Niala’s response was perceptive. She said the future is user-generated content on his or her own platform: everyone wants to be his or her own brand.

Recommended resources:
http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ - a simple way to manage Twitter


Copy Editing, Big Type and Search
Gil Asakawa, Manager, Audience Development, MediaNews Group Interactive
Henry Fuhrmann, Assistant Managing Editor, Los Angeles Times
Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology, Google

Publishing to the web extends your brand. In the competition to be the first to get the story out, Google, Yahoo, and other search engines play an important role. How the choice of headlines, lead-ins, and search terms matters in getting a story noticed.

Gil emphasized that users do not browse, they search. Traffic comes from search engines, other websites, and social networking sites. Henry added, “…channel what you’re already doing.” He called Craig a rock star, while Craig revealed that Google’s “secret sauce” is basically to think like a person. He advised journalists to “be smart” about writing articles that stand on their own, such as breaking up briefs to provide more stand-alone content for Google to search.

Much of the panel discussion focused on questions from the audience.

I asked why Strange Tango appeared at the top of Bing’s searches, while its position migrated between the top and bottom of Google searches. The personal website had launched two days earlier, and I wanted to know how to rise to the top of Google’s page ranks. In response, Gil kindly typed in the URL so the entire, standing-room-only crowd could view the new website. A Google search further revealed that StrangeTango.com populated the entire page: Google had found Strange Tango.

In internet marketing, the objective is to rise in the Google page rank—strategies include links to social aggregation sites, other websites, blogs, link exchanges, and using keywords. Content ranks higher in search as Google searches the tops of stories. The same keywords should show up in title bar, URL, lede and headline. Popular referring domains include Google, Yahoo, The Drudge Report, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

The best tips to make your content search-engine friendly include:
- Use keywords where search engines scan: title bar, URL, headline, and tops of articles, use keywords in the first several paragraphs
- Front-load the headline–Google’s algorithm focuses on the first few words
- Use hard news ledes instead of feature ledes–Google searches the tops of stories
- Be first–what gets posted first, gets indexed first
- Break up briefs packages–post items separately for cumulative effect.

Recommended resources:
http://www.google.com/trends - analysis tool that allows comparisons of how often specific search terms are being searched on Google
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ - daily search volume of keywords


Multimedia Storytelling and Planning
Andrew DeVigal, Multimedia Editor, The New York Times
Victoria Lim, Multiplatform Reporter
Constance Hale, Director, Program on Narrative Journalism, Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

Alternate story forms engage the audience. This panel focused on writing for the web and nonlinear narratives, defining the elements of the best multimedia storytelling.

The collaborative team at The New York Times integrates interactive news, photography, graphics, video, and design as part of the company’s multimedia strategy. Projects designated as one-off projects may take weeks to produce, while templated projects, such as an audio slideshow, are built once and used recurrently. Andrew gave the audience insight into the process and technology of an innovative, interactive multimedia presentation that illustrated reactions of fans to Michael Jackson’s death. The proprietary software was created using Flash authoring software and was originally commissioned for another package before being redirected for this breaking news story. Representative figures of fans around the world could be clicked on to read each individual’s comments.

Compelling journalism innovates by using a unique narrative voice and style. Constance identified the elements of narrative journalism—modeled after literature—as human drama involving a hero or protagonist, literary structure, metaphor, and craftsmanship. The best storytelling is an emotional, cathartic experience, told in an artful way with foreshadowing and a layered narrative. Slide shows, videos, and powerful images enhance the emotional experience.

Victoria Lim gave examples of how her television broadcast packages were repurposed as online content.

Recommended resources:
http://www.10000words.net/ - tips on how to incorporate multimedia technologies into journalism
http://www.vuvox.com/ - create interactive slideshows and presentations


I came away from the AAJA convention feeling encouraged and rejuvenated. The meticulous planning that went into the yearlong, highly collaborative process of creating the personal website—serendipitously—had already integrated the cutting-edge concepts of engaging storytelling and iconic style highlighted by the panelists!

For my friends and me, in the near future, it will be very interesting to follow Strange Tango’s journey from its launch during the AAJA Boston convention to its positioning as a global platform.


Mission: Create a website that is edgy and ethereal

StrangeTango.com: Literature as an Art Installation in Cyberspace

“What remains as documentation of a life? Strange Tango mines 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.”

The Muse Room

I've alluded to The Muse Room in my dispatches and postings. It is room 856, The Royal Sonesta Hotel, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I first checked in, the reservationist told me the room was special.

Indeed it is--stunning view of water, sky, and cityscape that fills one wall...my favorite hotel room in all Boston. Inspiration for the images in StrangeTango.com and chapters of Millennium Muse poured out in this womb room.

Peter Jennings

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 a fellowship at Harvard University and, later, for my passion for writing and StrangeTango.com, my experiences at World News Tonight with Peter Jennings left its mark on my hard news judgment and what I choose to post. I will always remember "The Rim," the morning call presided over by Rick Kaplan, lunch in Peter’s office, and shadowing in the wings as this consummate professional settled into the anchor desk each evening.

As an intern at ABC News in New York, and then later at CNN International in Atlanta, I also gleaned much from my interactions with Michael Schulder, then a writer on the program and now a Senior Executive Producer at CNN Atlanta; I was also shown the ropes by Bob Aglow, then a national producer at WNT who became Executive Producer, News Coverage, MSNBC on the Internet, and is now the founder of ClimateQuest.

The 8x10 autographed photo is a lovely memento I’ll always treasure...

(photo from my personal collection)

A./Dream: The Strange Tango Backstory

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 27 entries for the inaugural run to feature a representative sampling of my work and my world, the Strange Tango cosmology. I have grouped the entries into two categories, “A.” and “dream”. “Dream” consists of all 27 entries—ranging from narrative nonfiction, to political analysis, to Neo-Zen style, to food recipes.

“A.” is my first initial and, alphabetically, leads the tag list. “A.” chronicles Strange Tango's yearlong journey—from its conception as an innovative personal website that would take content, art, and literature to a multilayered level never seen before in cyberspace—to its live launch on 8.12.09 during the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention in Boston just last week.

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 signed up for Facebook on June 19, and in six weeks I had 72 Facebook friends and a potential 50,000 connections. I opened a Twitter account not long after. I’ll send out my first tweet this week.

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 and comments 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. Cosmically, the difference between the Renaissance and the new Millennium is this—Leonardo the artist was male and his muse was a younger woman; however, in Strange Tango the epistolary novella (that became the inspiration for the personal website), the reverse is true: the artist is a young woman and her muse is an older male.

The process by which we created the oeuvre was collaborative to a very high degree. I was responsible for the art direction of the website; the writings are the products of my intellect; and all the images seen on the web pages are my photographic work—I created the special effects in-camera. Truly, I was extremely fortunate to have discovered stellar, relatively unknown talents from all around the country whose work I could showcase. The buy-in was that our combined skills and passions could create something special to share with the world.

Chris Barros and Roger Fussa, who later became the Associate Director of Alumni Relations at Boston University, were my two best friends when I worked at the Harvard Business School. Chris is a beloved figure and tech guru at HBS who thought it would be fun to work with me on the website. He was the first collaborator I added, and our partnership was responsible for all the pre-production work on the website.

Brian Saffold, who produced the film treatment iteration of Strange Tango, had generously produced, gratis, our audition tape when his sister Nicole and I applied for The Amazing Race 10. I was so impressed with the cleverness, subtlety, and professionalism of Brian’s work that I began to look for an opportunity to give him a larger stage for his talent.

For the music used in the Strange Tango video, Dan Brunelle had very kindly given Brian permission to use his composition, "Lover's in Reverse," when they were students at Columbia College Chicago, the innovative school for media, arts, and performance.

Raphael Seligmann has been a dear friend and alter ego since our undergraduate days at Cornell University. No one but Raphael could have written the eloquent words on the Prelude and the double-sided information sheet and press release.

Raphael referred Marlee O'Neal, who came on board only two months before the launch to weave all the elements and contributions into one seamless whole. After I described the project and art direction, Marlee spent some time by her favorite destination at the beach and ocean and quickly came back to me with pdf files of her pitch perfect interpretation. Marlee also suggested a music player on the website, so we all listened to some royalty free music. I decided then that since Dan’s composition on the Strange Tango video was so sublime, that perhaps he would consider writing iconic music for the website.

Dan is a busy musician in the Chicago area and is much in demand by Grammy Award-winning artists and filmmakers, so when Brian and I finally got a hold of him we were thrilled when he said yes. It took until the 11th hour and four different music sketches, but Dan told me I wouldn’t be disappointed. I had much faith in his musical gifts and was overjoyed at the final result. Dan's original composition for the Strange Tango website, "Tango for Diving Birds," is a favorite of his.

We try to keep the website content fresh. I post regularly, and since this is a fluid site, enhancements to original postings are made as needed. The Millennium Muse chapter is also the space for experimental work, which we may add on a seasonal basis, more or less.

I want to acknowledge the contributions of Sangita Chandra, Dolores Kong, and Alan Hoffman. Since they are not listed as collaborators, I am giving our chief advisors a category of his or her own on the Life as Art blog. Sangita, Dolores, and Alan brought exquisitely meticulous sensibilities to help us critique and fine-tune the personal website.

Sangita is an Emmy Award-winning arts and culture producer/reporter at WCVB, the Hearst-Argyle flagship television station in Boston; her expertise in visuals and content was invaluable. Dolores is a Pulitzer Prize finalist in public interest reporting from her days at The Boston Globe. She is now a Senior Vice President at Winslow, Evans & Crocker, Inc., a Boston financial services firm. Dolores is responsible for the idea of having my own website, so I could have a worldwide audience for my musings.

Alan is another friend for life from our college years at Cornell. He is the founder of the Mission Group in San Diego, from its website, "an innovative planning firm developing cutting-edge strategies for improving the functioning of cities." Alan was one of two people, the other being Raphael, with whom I shared my earliest drafts of Strange Tango the epistolary novella.

life: strange tango

Alan suggested Strange Tango as the name for the personal website, telling me, “You are Strange Tango.”

In addition to Sangita, Dolores, and Alan, our expanded advisory board gave immediate feedback and suggestions on the smallest details: Nicole and Bill Maskiell, Mari and James Rubio, Khushi Bhatia, Byron Lee, Conway Kennedy, Bill Jennings, Steve Granada, Mai Huynh, Jackie Old Coyote, Amy Besaw, David Murphy, and Susie Barros.

So, this is our backstory. The mission: create a website that is edgy and ethereal.

Digital Multimedia Platforms / Spirit of Place

Day #3 at the Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) convention in Boston and the StrangeTango.com launch. I've been attending the panels on digital multimedia platforms and social media and technology. There is so much valuable take-away information that I will write the recap, in my signature thorough and engaging style, this weekend.

I do see the imprint of Sangita Chandra, convention co-chair, in the thoughtful offerings. Sangita, along with longtime AAJA/New England treasurer, Dolores Kong, has been involved with StrangeTango.com from the website's planning stage a year ago to its debut this week. With both the convention and the personal website, Sangita brings the qualities of refinement, perfectionism, and professionalism to everything in her purview. We first met as Hearst-Argyle Fellows at WCVB-TV 5 in Boston more than a decade ago. A mentor, then the director of community relations at the station, had encouraged me to introduce myself to Sangita, the fellow from two years previously. Sangita recently won her first Emmy Award!

At one of the panels where I was passing out my business card, I was thrilled to learn that a person sitting next to me, an Assistant Managing Editor at the Los Angeles Times, had first heard about StrangeTango.com through a Facebook post a week ago from a mutual friend in San Francisco. Rene Astudillo had sent out a post urging his Facebook friends to bookmark StrangeTango.com. People are sometimes incredulous that I write my essays, commentary, and observations from my home office in southwest Oklahoma. The internet makes our world so much smaller.

In fact, my collaborators--Raphael, Marlee, Brian, Chris, and Daniel--and I worked on the website through email and Facebook. We're based in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Virginia, and Oklahoma. We had no budget, and we're not monetized, so the project was pretty much done pro bono. We're sharing StrangeTango.com with the world as a labor of love and a platform for original and passionate creativity. As the website becomes established, I hope to showcase emerging talent and new ideas on this platform. About 75% of my family and friends in the real world do not use Facebook or Twitter, so the website is also a way for them to stay connected with me without being a part of Facebook's grand social experiment.

On the website, the Millennium Muse chapter is scheduled to open in Autumn 2009. We wanted to give our visitors something new and fresh to look forward to in the next few months. Muse is also a major project in and of itself. It will feature New Age Traveler, a chapter from the manuscript, which details my travels on 35 countries and 5 continents. Our visitors will authentically experience the spirit of place through my eyes in image and documentation. Dan Brunelle, our music virtuoso/visionary, will compose the original music score and design through special computer software that will provide a unique experience for each visitor.

Our challenge was to merge both iconic style and content in a technologically sophisticated way. Well, I did flatly declare up front our ambition: there is nothing on the web like StrangeTango.com.

"So you're Strange Tango! Everyone is talking about it!"

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 Committee chairperson and the AAJA/New England National Board representative the year that AAJA/NE took home chapter-of-the-year honors.

Being sentimental, I wanted to give the AAJA student journalists programs the opportunity to break the story about Strange Tango and its unique concept: Literature as an art installation in cyberspace. First thing in the morning at the registration desk, I was interviewed by a reporter with the mobile journalism project, and I also talked with the editor of AAJA Voices.

I've heard from friends around the country who are helping us go viral around the globe with this mantra:

Visit, bookmark, share: StrangeTango.com

Feedback:
"Deep and artistic"
"WOW....You're mentioned the site but completely different then I imaged. Different...alluring"
"Interesting...good read"
"I'm forwarding this site to friends. love the mix of current events & short stories. Sort of a one place shopping for the artistic at heart"

World-Wide Debut: StrangeTango.com is Live!

StrangeTango.com: Literature as an Art Installation in Cyberspace

Welcome to the StrangeTango.com personal website. We are a creative collaboration of 2 genders, 3 ethnicities, 3 different generations, 4 artists in different media, and all 6 of us are spread out on the East Coast, West Coast, and in America's heartland to bring you 1 seamless oeuvre.

It's a labor of love, not of commerce, and we worked on the website while juggling regular jobs and family responsibilities. Please help us spread the buzz with this mantra:

Visit, bookmark, share: StrangeTango.com

Thank you from: A. D. Tejada, Brian Saffold, Chris Barros, Dan Brunelle, Marlee O'Neal, Raphael Seligmann