steven wells « [last year's girl]

[T]his bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity — the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans — the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.

RIP, Steven Wells. I’m genuinely gutted about this, not least because I didn’t know that he was suffering from lymphatic cancer, which is ridiculous because he’d written about it often enough for Philadelphia Weekly. But I suspect that it’s better that I was continuing to enjoy his columns in the Guardian and for The Quietus, rather than wallowing in his imminent demise.

Swells was the best thing about the NMEh before I stopped reading it. We rarely agreed on anything (well, apart from Smiths fans), but dear God, I loved the way he said it.

He will be missed.

Friend and former colleague Everett True has collected some tributes here, as well as posting his own.

The Guardian also has a retrospective of some of his sports columns.

WE GOT OUT JUST IN TIME, I sometimes think: out of a New York City that was turning whiter than white, richer than rich, where you’d find a Ralph Lauren showroom on the corner where the best greengrocer used to be, where the New York Times Book Review holds proper parties in what once was the raunchy end of the meat-packing district, and struggling artists, having opened up the roughest zones to agreeable loft apartments, are no longer welcome.

This piece, ostensibly a book review, gripped me on Saturday morning til the bath water turned cold (hi Scotsman, fancy working up a site you can view on a mobile browser with the minimum of trouble?). This is my favourite sort of writing: the kind that comes from nowhere, that’s hidden away in the back pages in the guise of something else.

I think Julie and I got on the wrong bus yesterday – we seemed to take the long way round, a guided tour in a rickety old number 47 that reeked a little of piss around some of the southside’s less salubrious housing estates. Although everything’s slowly changing here – the old buildings are being pulled down and the tenements giving way to bespoke penthouse apartments. You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when the petrol station forecourt store is an M&S Simply Food.

My favourite part of the city is Pacific Quay at night; the new BBC Scotland headquarters glowing like a plate-glass monolith against a backdrop of show apartments and boutique hotels, just a stones throw from Govan. A few months ago a taxi driver told me that prices for flats in the area surrounding the development, which includes my own flat, are starting to creep up at the expense of us locals. I’m not a Daily Mail reader and I’m not looking to buy, but I wonder where the rest of us are supposed to go.

I don’t think you can kill a city though, not through buildings and commerce, and I’m not so naive as to think that the New York I inhabit in my dreams is anything more than a bohemian myth. There’s spirit under the surface if you know where to look; you can give the artists full-time jobs and council tax mandates but you can’t kill the desire to create in the driven. As for me, I wish I could be functional on four hours’ sleep a night – but I’ll get there.

Michael Pye says that Edinburgh could so easily be truly avant-garde; I’d say our own Glasgow is a better candidate but perhaps that’s because I was never in Edinburgh long enough to uncover its best-kept secrets. I thought that when I moved to the city my life would turn into an episode of Friends with a better soundtrack. It hasn’t happened quite yet, but as long as I’m watching telly all night it’s hardly going to.

PS I was madly in love with Steven Wells about ten years ago, when he wrote for the NME and I read it. Today, he has written this for the Guardian. It may be the best thing you read all day. Apart from the Speaking Clock’s comment on my last post (srsly).