Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Kill or Be Killed"
As was true for Abby & I, Mary spent her adolescence
deciding to be an all or nothing kind of babes. What was
being reached for was a kind of life unseen in America
before— as a painter, not just another parochial American
mediocrity, weaned on parochial American trash, but a dweller
in the higher, thinner air of the most developed kind of
painterly formality. Yet not just formalism, as Philly
had got a bad reputation for, but art that bespoke of
the highest level of confessional honesty. Art that
completely & absolutely expressed a definite, distinctive
self. All this wrapped in a world which granted her all
the sex, drugs, & clothing a woman could want. If, that
is, you were like her, & refused to settle for what she
would call the declasse. As when anyone among the very
normed out human race attempts to do anything new,
stakes around this individual were very high to push all
those individual impulses out the window, & force timid,
contrite compliance. So when Mary ploughs through her
Nineties days, her house becomes an explosively powder-
kegged battlefield, where Mary fights for the shining beacon
of that liberated life she so deserves. The Harju house in
Media, three sisters & two parents, is on the class cusp
between middle-of-the-middle & upper-middle. It’s
a semi-rich girl’s house. Everything about the house reeks
of complete, totalized WASP normalcy, Republicanized
“family values,” semi-devout (also) religiosity. Four bedrooms
on the big second floor, a living-room den & basement-den,
generically furnished, generically arranged. Kill or be killed.
© Adam Fieled 2026
deciding to be an all or nothing kind of babes. What was
being reached for was a kind of life unseen in America
before— as a painter, not just another parochial American
mediocrity, weaned on parochial American trash, but a dweller
in the higher, thinner air of the most developed kind of
painterly formality. Yet not just formalism, as Philly
had got a bad reputation for, but art that bespoke of
the highest level of confessional honesty. Art that
completely & absolutely expressed a definite, distinctive
self. All this wrapped in a world which granted her all
the sex, drugs, & clothing a woman could want. If, that
is, you were like her, & refused to settle for what she
would call the declasse. As when anyone among the very
normed out human race attempts to do anything new,
stakes around this individual were very high to push all
those individual impulses out the window, & force timid,
contrite compliance. So when Mary ploughs through her
Nineties days, her house becomes an explosively powder-
kegged battlefield, where Mary fights for the shining beacon
of that liberated life she so deserves. The Harju house in
Media, three sisters & two parents, is on the class cusp
between middle-of-the-middle & upper-middle. It’s
a semi-rich girl’s house. Everything about the house reeks
of complete, totalized WASP normalcy, Republicanized
“family values,” semi-devout (also) religiosity. Four bedrooms
on the big second floor, a living-room den & basement-den,
generically furnished, generically arranged. Kill or be killed.
© Adam Fieled 2026
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