Adam Fieled's Miscellaneous: 2026

This portrait of me was taken by New York poet Amy King in 2009, at the venue Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I am reading from When You Bit..., the month is August. Also on the bill: Nada Gordon, David Wollach. Like my tat?

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Introducing Dawn Gailey

My friend Dawn Gailey, originally from Phoenixville, took several portraits of me at the Last Drop at 13th and Pine Streets in Center City in the fall of 2008. The bottom one here captures me looking quite like a rebel without a cause. More to say on the Drop, as we called it, in the months to come, as a crucial hang-out space in the Aughts, and site for day-to-day mischief. The basis, also, for Letters to Dead Masters.

Portraiture

This is Mary Evelyn Harju's masterful portrait of me on Avenue A in the East Village, also in 2007. Turns out, for several months in the spring of 1999, I had lived on Avenue A in Alphabet City, as the neighborhood is called. At that time, nothing had really coalesced around me and books. By 2007, I was a much more consolidated presence. The way Mary set up the pictorial composition here is amazing, and had to have been done on the fly. For a visual artist who took heat for being too plodding, too methodical, it proves that Mary could be inspired in an impulsive way, too. The wackiness of Mary's balance of elements often meant that when she had a camera rather than paints, she could indulge herself in impulsive moves, against the idea of too much conscious craft. In this case, all the elements came together in such a way that she managed to set up a compositional structure as satisfying as the ones in her best paintings. She was happy to let elements fall in place as they may.

Mariposa-worthy

You can see here, in the attached pic, that Mary, by the time we were back again as a couple in 2007, wasn't making an attempt to incinerate anyone anymore. She was OK being plain Jane. There we were, at Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a Mipoesias reading. The collision of Mary Evelyn Harju with Mary Walker Graham, as is also seen here, was notable. Ms. Graham was in New York for some kind of publishing conference. Briana Winter being there, from the Nineties Sidewalk Cafe anti-folk crowd, is amazing, too. After the reading, I took the train with the two Marys back to Manhattan, and we stopped for a bite to eat at a random East Village diner. The two Marys were cordial with each other, but Mary Evelyn's then-new restrained style meant that no sparks needed to fly. Were we completely sedate? That's not really fair, either. As people might have guessed, coke was out, for Mary Evelyn then; but all her earthiness and Mariposa-worthy vegan purity did not preclude the continuation of Mary's cannabis habit. We smoked together semi-constantly, even though I was also working as an academic at the time, and pursuing books along a careerist track that took us to New York and elsewhere in 2007 many times.

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

East Falls Mary

So, it's now been established: Mary spent the mid-Aughts living in East Falls. East Falls is an obscure neighborhood, within the city limits of Philadelphia, but far from the action of Center City. It happens not to be far from where Jeremy was stationed in Manayunk. Two Septa stops. Her story about herself then is that she was being a technical writer. Good pay, she said, but no insurance benefits. Abby and I didn't know whether to buy it. Mary had no training to be a technical writer at all. Was she trying to one-up us? In any case, worth noting that in the second half of 2006, when Mary moved back to West Philadelphia and became part of the Center City scene again, she was more restrained, less flamboyant then she had been. Mary as a mind-blowing tornado, prepared to grandstand if necessary, was replaced by Mary chastened and sobered. She declared herself a vegan and worked part-time at the Mariposa co-op, not far from where she lived. Provocative attire was replaced with practical. Wherever grandstanding Mary had gone, she'd been replaced with a convert to the religion of fastening one's self, joining one's self to the Earth.

Monday, March 30, 2026

On being painted as Abby

Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far sunken from John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.

On being painted as David

The solvency of Mary Evelyn Harju's The Fall, from 2008, is about form and formal rigor. It would be easy, just from this piece, to call her a formalist. In Philly, this is a dread categorization— Manhattan has always accused Philadelphia of bland, tepid formalism— but if the Harju piece is charged into being more, placement within proximity to other Aughts Philadelphia products, writing and photographs (a benevolent matrix structure here), transcendentalizes the piece into being something more. The similarity of how I am painted here to Michelangelo's David, the ideal male nude in art, highlights both Mary's twin obsessions, the body and the Renaissance, and the sense of a relationship narrative laid down, also similar to what I do in Equations. The phenomenology, for me, of being painted as David, is about an era in which raw physicality, the primordial physical, was both valued and fetishized. I participated, as has been established— threw myself into the Aughts matrix, with all the freshness and naivete of a young adult, not yet seasoned by continual intercourse with the material or cultural world. My version of David is thus one of original innocence. Adam, if you will, before the Fall. The narrative of the painting is specifically about innocence transformed into experience. Eden, or the Edenic. The piece freezes before I make my choice— to bite from the apple or not— and thus destabilizes that the outcome must be a predictable one. On another level, this is my ascendent moment as a pin-up— full frontal nudity establishes that— and, as a classicized version of a pin-up, the painting is meant to be as seductive and provocative as representations of raw flesh can be. The image here is not chaste.

To Know Mary

To know Mary is ride into the tactile and the carnal.

Friday, March 27, 2026

To Know Abby

To know Abby is to get back to where you once belonged.

Thursday, March 26, 2026

Mutants II (Electric Boogaloo)

About pursuing cultural Philly in the Aughts as a raison d'etre, I made a decision in about 2012 that I haven't looked back from. Some things clarified themselves for me, so that the path chosen was, I felt, the enlightened one. Accusations of hubris or delusional grandeur aside, I was unable to resist this thought— this group, multi-disciplinary, who I call the Philly Free School, are mavericks. If we are mavericks, it's because we're the first group of American artists to climb up to the artistic perch of classicist Europe. Until us, no one in America really has or did that particular task. This is especially true of me and Abby. Thus, any engagement with any media enterprise which would refuse to acknowledge this maverick achievement would have to be a useless one. But, let's get real, shall we? The American media deplore classicist Europe. The syllogism has, thusly, to end in a temporary media blackout. Perhaps a Cold War, too. So that, Mary here can out-charisma Deborah Harry all she wants. The sense the media likes to emphasize, of reach— has to be blood-sacrificed, on the altar of essential, individualized integrity maintained. Do we need Anton LaVey to do the sacrifice? Probably. But I am setting this group up to go the distance. That's the conceit. One way or another.

Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Mutants!

There is something else to say about taking Mary and Abby, and making them pin-ups. What I am about to say pertains particularly to Abby, as a nascent heir apparent to Ingres and David, the French Neo-Classicists. To take said heir apparent to Ingres and David, and enfranchise her as a babe, as you see here, makes her and I both freaks and mutants. Taking the twig-like mold around Neo-Classical level painting and snapping it, is a good way to earn a hale-and-hearty, completely stunned silence from all and sundry. Thus, soaring numbers on these sights, sometimes staggering numbers, but no buzz. Bizarre. And, as time goes by, we're only going to get more outlandish, more bizarre. The catalogue of pin-up shots and the catalogue of paintings will be forced to do a dance like the Lambada, the Forbidden Dance. No one on Gods green earth will know what to make of us at all, I predict, half-kidding. No molds, no formulas, no codes. No one behind us pushing us out as stooges, either. But worth noting that in this first wave of recognition, wherein the sites are manned with rubber-neckers from all necks of the woods at all times, I was able to spot something in us new enough, and bizarre enough, that the mutant streak we embody or boast, may be seen from many perspectives to be the dominant one. And that that's fine.

Saturday, March 21, 2026

Anonymous (West Philadelphia, USA): "Portrait: Abby Heller-Burnham"

Friday, March 20, 2026

Steaminess in the Cathedral

How societies frame high art, when it happens for real, has never really changed much. Without undue cynicism, it's easy to see how the sanitization process works. High art tends to be smeared with the same patina of associations— something sanctimonious, fraught with pseudo-religious over and undertones, Sunday School-ish, "eat your veggies," something to be endured. Something uncool. This is all a price to be paid for the ability high art has to conquer long durations of time. No to mention the accrual of enormous sums of invested money to works of high art, making it game to say it, and they, earn their keep in the world. Yet, no fun. And the fraudulence around popular art and popular culture products takes "eat your veggies" and begets "eat your gristle." Aughts Philadelphia has something else in mind, which sounds simple but isn't. Mary, Abby, and the rest work in an unprecedented way, and on an unprecedented level in America, as classicists who can also be elite as pin-ups. There is no reason Abby and Mary should not be pin-ups. They were steamy, racy, and very sexualized. Why not? Well, society may say, because that doesn't fit the cathedral mold. Doesn't allow for proper sanitization. I am asking people to appreciate and accept an ambitious agenda from us. I am proselytizing that what came out of Philadelphia in the Aughts should be allowed both rights, both privileges. Pin-ups in the cathedral. Let us throw away the molds, throw away the formulas, and enfranchise this body of work to do what it wants to do in the world. Both. Thus, we create for ourselves parameters in which we can have and maintain the dignity and integrity we deserve. Peace.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Mary Evelyn Harju on Saint Catherine Street"

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

Adam Fieled, Anonymous: "Mary Evelyn Harju at 4325 Baltimore Avenue II"

Monday, March 16, 2026

Head Shot

On Abby and I in New York in the Nineties.

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Adam Fieled, Anonymous: "Mary Evelyn Harju, 4325 Baltimore Avenue, West Philadelphia, 2001"

Monday, February 23, 2026

Something Solid

Something Solid, as manuscript-in-progress, has now achieved some solidity.

Wednesday, February 18, 2026

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Star Child in Scud

Star Child, another razzmatazz from The Spurgin Chronicles in SS, in Scud.

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Archive-It.org: Art Recess 2

Done in Dresden, this archived page puts Karen Volkman at the head of the class.

Saturday, January 31, 2026

A template typhoon...

...hit The Seattle Star the right way. Check out The Ballad of Robert Johnson.

Friday, January 23, 2026

The Wilderness Sequence (2026)

I. Nights I Staggered Drunkenly

Nights I staggered drunkenly, down the winding,
white-walled corridor which led to two major Highwire
entrances (the ware-house space & the gallery itself);
how it was that our version of freedom (Free School),
stitched to good old-fashioned luck, had been allowed
to recreate cultural Philadelphia from its insides out, I
could never figure out. The set-up, me calling the shots,
added a patina of raw power to my persona which had
never been there before. I looked loose, worldly. I was,
unwittingly, being scoped out by eyes raised on the rigors
of politics, blended with also-raw eroticism, raw determination.
In the sense of a quintessence of material action, the world.
With that quintessential world, the possibility of quick,
painful obsolescence— alongside the drunken rapture.

II. Beleaguered In Lasting

Two bottles of half-finished whiskey gaped on
the island space, mid-gallery; green odors emanated from
corners. The crowd, teens & twenties, ribald,
projected an O-mind, as though a Pandora’s Box
had opened, allowing them to float in a stark bardo
where salvation was granted to those gutsy enough
to ride the rollicking waves. We had turned the right
keys to let these people free, taught them the rigors
of real freedom. My satori, then, was about responsibility.
Knowledge had to be passed what we’d accomplished
here, in Philadelphia. Only I could give form to all
the shapeless exuberance. Prizes yet to be granted
to me strutted around, bathing in the warmth of our masses.
Another satori, more responsibilities. Beleaguered in lasting.

III. Crowned

The routine social maintenance of our domain—
another drunken night at McGlinchey’s, eyes & ears
to the ground as usual, broken then only by your
arrival. It must’ve been Nick who met you first,
I don’t remember, but I saw you were fixated on
him. Hannah: novelist, politico, of course, but looks which
teetered ambiguously into divisiveness for those
who knew you— heavy brows, wavy hair, tall, a bit
tomboyish, also, but articulate, a charmer, & yet I
registered the sense that if I ever got you, it would
be something gratuitous, a surprise, because closed
seemed to be the fortress, & choosing Nick seemed
to betray a masochistic streak. That night, his front
swelled visibly with your arrival— I stepped back.

You were, must’ve been, I later realized, underwater
somehow, surveying currents, examining the wildlife,
surreptitiously & invisibly carving a watery path to me.
I had only what the male of the species always has—
the equipment to complete your circuitry, potent or
impotent in any time or context, waiting latent to
take our moment, make it crescendo through the reef,
weed, rock, as though destined, written into ocean’s
records an eternity ago, when all life dwelt in the ocean,
all encounters occurred in resplendent semi-darkness.
And all this still sitting with the gang at the Glinch,
holding your own with a bunch of macho punks, who
were taking something in Philadelphia by force, me
selected silently, the tomboy an Ocean Queen, crowned—

IV. Undulant

I’d made plans to meet you in Bar Noir
on 18th; you were there; we drank. What
happened after that, in the Logan Square
flat, is that in defrocking you knocked over
an antique lamp bequeathed to me by my
aunt in Mahopac. Serendipity, I thought,
stunned then into silence by your bedroom
élan. Outside, a sultry night simmered; this
night of all nights, scattered green glass littered
my bedroom floor, & I finally got taken, past
liquor, to what eternity was only in your mouth—
as though you’d jumped from a forest scene
(ferns, redwoods), a world of pagan magic,
into a scene still undulant with possibilities—

V. Denouement

Was it even you anymore? You took the podium,
began your screed: here’s what Philadelphia could be.
The night proceeded from act to act— our enemies
were taken aback— I now boasted big-boy curating
entanglements. I knew that place— the wrong kind
of underwater, piranhas hungrily looking for what might
be real to rip to shreds, offal everywhere—
was not for me, just as (to be stern) you were not for me either.
All your politico postures were about barnstorming fortresses
set against you, ravishing them through pure force
majeure. You were pure angel/demon, Hannah. I’d
have to retreat to the back of your consciousness—
an old conquest, not especially vaunted, burrowing down
into binds to find reality, missing unreality’s deliciousness—

© Adam Fieled 2017-2026

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Frequencies II (2017 draft)

TAPESTRY

Okra, stamens, roots, all that in nature

coalesces in straight, staunch, erect

growth; also, a shadow father bent,

then erect, then bent again, perverse

from amassing wealth in a world

whose submissiveness poisons him;

was all she saw in bed with me that night.

I was, it turns out, to be part of a tapestry;

where I’m woven in— off-center,

towards the right edge, beige, as she

chiseled a persona out of who

she was, pliant, planed beneath our

thrusts, caresses, & did homage

to the agony of submissive flesh.

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Frequencies I (2018 draft)

NARROW BED

New Hampshire, summer night: I

nailed her, pliant, tanned, teased out

beneath me as flies roughened the room,

pirouetted moist air, as we rose

over convention to do just what we

wanted: make myth become flesh.

She stood, sans me knowing, on

prosody, a series of poems she wrote

swirling around how she might deal

with contracts, extinction. The poems,

I’d guess, were running through her

head as we made love on the narrow

bed. The sun rose at 4 am, roughed

us up again, but what was done: a final draft.

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Stoli in The Seattle Star

Stoli, from Something Solid, in The Seattle Star. For Gaetan.

Thursday, April 16, 2026

Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Thursday, April 2, 2026