We’ve never had a sparring partner quite like Steven Wells who, sadly, passed away last night after a long battle with cancer. And in another life, we could have been thick as thieves — that’s the way it always is between arch-nemeses. When Steven Wells came to Philadelphia, he’d already done his time at NME in the late 80s and 90s, when he apparently suffered through the birth of all that he’d come to deride one day as “twee.” In Philebrity, and this site’s editor, Wells saw an outsize version of feyness that literally drove him to distraction. At one point, no less than a whole month’s worth of Wells’ columns were devoted to the perceived lifestyle infractions of Sweeney and/or Philebrity. A number of them even had illustrations.
But here’s the thing: We had the good the fortune to speak at length with Wells on a few occasions, and frankly, he was fucking awesome. He was bright, he was hilarious, he was very much attuned to things like sexual politics and the self-congratulatory nature of the media (even, especially, the so-called “alternative” media) and had a way of talking about these things where you could allow him to spew just forever. Given his impressive resumé, we’d always wondered why and how on earth he’d wound up at Philadelphia Weekly. Sure, many of his columns there were dashed-off affairs; Wells treated that paper like the fishwrap it is, and rightly so. But he cared deeply about his friends and the new tribe of co-conspirators he found himself among here. A few years ago, we were trying to do a piece about a movement, led in part by Wells, to oust an editor at PW, viewed by many to thwart any move towards new life the staff made, through a signature combination of ineffectuality, passive-aggressiveness and really, when it came down to it, just not fucking caring. At the time, Wells couldn’t go on the record about the matter, but since we shared the PW experience, we wound up chatting for a long time about the culture at that paper. Citing this fucked-up standard or that, Wells would say, more than once, “It’s fucking disgusting.”
“It’s fucking disgusting,” as it happens, could very well sum up the Steven Wells stance. Much of what he wrote about — America’s obsession with religion, those for whom posture is more important than substance, and so on — could in fact be summed up just this way. And at the risk of repeating himself, Wells said it, over and again. Well, Steven, frankly, we think it’s fucking disgusting that you died. We’ll miss ya, buddy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 11:20 am.