forever in progress

At long (long) last I've returned to my often delayed writing project, a history of John Holmstrom's brief career as a video games and home computing journalist. My draft is predictably shaggy; I'm in the middle of trying to reconstruct the thought process I abandoned in July, which entails a lot of exasperated sotto voce grumbling (“What in the hell were you trying to do here, and where are you going, and really, why are you writing this dumb thing anyway?”). In any case, I think I'm slowly restoring sense and shape to my writing, which means I've had to prune, and will have to prune some dead ends along the way. No sense in killing these darlings when I can just post them here, my version of an odds and sods anthology.

I'm Beginning to See the Light

I wisely removed this detour into the interview Lou Reed once granted John Holmstrom. Other than being a casual gamer himself, Reed has nothing to do with the story I'm writing. This, then, is Michael spinning his wheels, putting words––any words––down on the page.

“Holmstrom’s wildest hopes for Punk were galvanized by a chance encounter with Lou Reed, the onetime Velvet Underground frontman who had recently dropped Metal Machine Music on an unsuspecting world. Reed was already a demigod of the underground when Holmstrom and McNeil sandbagged the rock ‘n’ roll animal at CBGB. Reed, nonplussed, agreed to an interview, which Holmstrom memorably reconstructed in three cramped pages of comics and hand-lettered transcripts. Reed made the cover of Punk’s first issue, of course, drawn by Holmstrom as Frankenstein’s creature, hollow cheeked and glaring at readers through dilated eyes like television screens. Later, Holmstrom would learn from friends that Reed had been “nasty and obnoxious” during the interview, but Holmstrom wasn’t bothered (Punk 11). Reed’s imprimatur gave Punk instant standing, suggesting an institutional credibility that didn’t exist except as a cartoon mirage. By 1979, and even as the magazine was collapsing, Punk’s bona fides were such that its pages included a wide swath of contributors from across the city and parts beyond. Among them was Lou Stathis, a budding writer who, like Lou Reed, would later do Holmstrom a favor that would prove to be a turning point in his career, one that would launch his brief but intensive contribution to the nascent field of video game journalism.”