Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "The Young and the Restless"

Dredging up dirt from the depths of our own Earth,
let it not be said about the Divine Miss H that nothing
in her mirrored my own carnivorous oafishness. Indeed,
I rush to defend myself against accusations of oafishness
with the data that the first half of the year 2002 was made
completely miserable for me by the Divine Miss H doing
a yo-yo routine with my body, my soul, and everything
integrated between my inner-Jesus and David cohering
then. Three times, during the first half of 2002, I was,
I felt, consolidated into the kind of ad hoc marriage which
was to be our signature. Three times, during said period,
the Divine Miss H abruptly announced, apropos of
dropping a bomb as casually as possible, that she was now
sleeping with Whoever, which meant I was back on the hook

of being on hold, indefinitely. During these excruciating times,
I found myself not Jesus or David but Adam, and madly in love
with a complete twit, whose tartishness outshone the very sun in
the sky, and who I might paint, if I could paint, as Isis, or Ingres’
Odalisque, or even, to be ribald, and take the thing more where
I wanted to go, Manet’s Olympia. So, the boor banging away
at the Divine Miss K has ways and means of defending himself,
against a classic Lady-of-the-Scales, the Cardinal Air, who
is always happy to rationalize away unpleasant realities as she
does her sweep-throughs. As we take whatever place the world
gives us in the vaunted Culture Firmament which overhangs
our enterprise, no one did The Young and the Restless
quite like us. A soap opera we were, with stakes very high
to annihilate the entire cultural past of America. Tarts and oafs.

© Adam Fieled 2026