BY JOEY SWEENEY | We didn’t have the word for it 10 or 15 years ago, but we do now: Street art — by which I mean the era of of yarn bombs, Gritty stickers, and Deadmau5 figurines atop the PAFA building — was cheugy. It had appropriation issues, its proponents were generally pretty annoying, and it basically became a signifier that marked out places where either gentrification was already happening or was about to. It was basically your nephew who just bought a place in Fishtown. 

But guess what: Nature is healing. How do I know? Last week, I spotted a brand new Female Joe Pesci tag.

Street art — or at least this very particular understanding of it — was essentially a fad. You know what’s permanent, though? Tagging. Tagging has been around since the moment a caveman fingerpainted with some blood or dung on a big rock that he knew everyone was going to walk by sooner or later. What is writing or painting itself other than this, really? Even if you don’t put your name on it, if you’re any good, sooner or later, someone will wind up doing it for you. Your name is important. To paraphrase Marlo Stanfield, your name is your name. 

Female Joe Pesci was tagging around the city definitely before the pandemic, though it’s hard to say for exactly how long. But I know I loved this tag at first sight, and it has only continued from there. What’s not to love? The very sequence of words — which is tagged in an almost loop-de-loop style — conjures a whole attitude, a story that you can’t quite get your head around, and most importantly an ethos that speaks of this city. We’re sick of hearing it described as “grit.” That shit is insulting. Describe it for what it is: Female Joe Pesci. The collision of things you know and things you have never once even thought about but exist right here nonetheless. It’s elegant, too, because it’s female Joe Pesci, but it’s also hilarious and true, because c’mon. To see it written on a wall, large and quickly, is something that I, as a native Philadelphian, find empowering.

This all checks out, it would seem, via this interview I was blown away to find on YouTube with someone purporting to be Female Joe Pesci, smoking a cig and having a White Claw whilst giving an interview in full, non-appropriated hoagiemouth:

During the very worst moments of the pandemic, one day I was walking near 2nd and Spring Garden, and there, on a highway wall, was the Female Joe Pesci tag, proud and strong. I remember that day, because I stopped in my tracks and texted my partner a photo of it. To me, it was proof that life persists. That even in the middle of the premiere dying event of the last half century, here was a fellow human being who was alive. Alive to the sublime and alive to the silly, and so in love with it all that they would risk life and limb to climb a fence in the middle of the night and spray paint three words on an interstate wall that simply cannot fail to make me smile.

I felt that again last week, when I noticed a new FJP tag at Delaware Ave. and Race St., twelve feet long on some kind of extended cyclone-fence-trashbag thing underneath the Ben Franklin Bridge. This is across from Fringe Arts, a venue and a festival that has been struggling to find its own inner Female Joe Pesci for two decades now. And here she is! It’s a big tag, on a road that’s travelled 24/7, perhaps now more than most times of the year, even.

She’s back!, I thought, electrified. And if she’s back, I thought, maybe we’re all back, we’re all back on our good good bullshit, doing whatever it takes to get back. To get back to where we once belonged.