We saw it when turning onto the Benjamin Franklin Parkway on our first trip to Philadelphia to start looking at houses, someone had spray-painted on a Jersey barrier
irregular.
After we moved in, we ran into it everyplace.
As we’ve been settling in I keep thinking of some dialogue from the very end of David Byrne’s film “True Stories” (1986), where Byrne (as the narrator) says:
When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place and I don’t notice those things anymore.
Part of my goal with these posts in the “Philly” category is to document what it feels like as newcomers here. Already, after 3 months here I’m aware that I’ve been acclimating to things, but it’s not always clear which things are fading into the mundane.
Eventually I looked into this and found out more about the artist:
On the faces of eroded barricades, rotting alleyway dumpsters, dark underpasses, and window-size wood panels, the word irregular has become an increasingly regular sight for Philadelphians — and a mark of artist Sean Hassett’s growing presence.
Hassett, who goes by the moniker “Irregular” or “Irregular Sean,” has spray-painted and penned his graffiti tag across the outskirts of West Philly to Chinatown, Spring Garden, and Brewerytown to the beating heart of Center City. Yet, his identity and motive are largely cloaked in mystery.
Back in the 80s, I read the book Postmodernism and its Discontents, which contains an article making the case that the dominant mode of expression in post-modernism was parody, and used a very specific and non-standard definition of the word: “repetition with critical distance.”
If you accept that premise and definition, I’ve also found a post-modern parody of irregular., likely by two separate hands:
Stay until the end.
IF YOU CAN THINK OF IT, IT EXISTS SOMEWHERE