Me, Sean, Chris, Sandhya, and Nick

Head Shot

This commercial was directed by none other than Detroit native Sam Raimi, at a pivotal time in his career. It was after Evil Dead II, but before he went to Hollywood and made Darkman, the best comic-book movie adaptation ever, except it wasn’t based on any existing comic-book. It launched the career of Liam Neeson and led the way to the neverending cascade of superhero movies, none of which beat Darkman in my opinion, including Raimi’s own Spider Man in 2002. Fast-forward to 2011 and Sam Raimi is now Hollywood royalty.

The other person in that commercial who went on to fame and legend was …

… Simon, the hero of the video game. Castlevania II, I am only just now learning, was an innovative videogame in the way it introduced role-playing and non-linear quests into the side-scrolling platform-type game, and heralded a stream of similar “metroidvania” games. Castlevania went on to become the single longest-running videogame title in history, and although Castlevania II was the weakest seller of the series, it is venerable enough now to be the subject of (semi-)serious study by scholarly videogame critics. If you are older than I am, you may be shocked to learn that there even exist scholars and serious students of videogames. But in fact Simon beat Sam in a way because the videogame industry is now larger and more profitable than the movie business.

As for me, well, that was it folks. That was as big as I got. I could have been the next Brad Pitt. Or maybe more of a John Turturro. Didn’t happen that way. Instead, as the residuals money trickled in, I wound up with an unsmall amount of discretionary funds for a 15-year-old. I could have saved it to pay for two or three months of university expenses. I could have squandered it on comic books and other habitual pursuits. Instead, my parents put me on an airplane to sunny Sri Lanka, then very much in the middle of its 30-year civil war. There I traveled on foot from Trincomalee to Kataragama and learned vital wearing-a-sarong and eating-rice-with-my-hands skills that serve me well to this day.

Hey I think I've seen that picture somewhere before

It’s frustrating. Perhaps I’ve just been lucky to share my life online for over eight years now without getting burned. Quite the opposite. This website has enabled me to meet wonderful people I never would have otherwise, to make serendipitous connections that would seem miraculous in the pre-internet world. And yet now having that boundary crossed… it really stings. My wife, who has a much more public-facing job than I do, was especially mortified. I’ve read a hundred times about the dangers of putting family information online, but I thought my site was too small or my intentions sincere or … I guess I just should have known better.

The upshot is Bin Gregory Productions will be less personal in the future. I’ve restricted most of my Flickr stream, I’ve started pulling out child names and such from my archives, and I’ll be much more careful and particular about family-related stories in the future. I can live with embarrassing myself, but embarrassing my family is a serious dereliction of duty.

Southfield and the Jeffries

This is the Southfield-Jeffries Interchange, a monumental no-place that towers over the landscape, quite easily the tallest structure on the West Side. It has appeared in bad dreams more times than I can count. Details change, but most often, the interchange is completely filled with broken or unmoving cars and I find myself walking miserably up or down those tall arching, curving ramps. A meaningless series of dreams no doubt, and yet out of all the places and spaces I’ve inhabited around Detroit, it is that object that crops up most often in my imagination.

The first set of pictures is from our neighborhood in New Delhi, India, where I lived for four years when I was very young. It was hard to find. I had to send several pictures back to my father and mother to comment on before I narrowed it down to what you see here.

The houses along our block were mostly three story flats, with common side walls, sort of like townhouses. That street was amazing. I remember people bringing camels and elephants that kids could ride for a fee, and trained dancing bears and snake charmers performing. The “elbow” in the street was wide enough for kids to play ball games like cricket. The roofs were cool too. We had the top flat with a huge open veranda, from where I could get onto the roof. Since it doesn’t rain much there, the roofs are all flat, and since the houses adjoin one another, it makes it easy to explore. My memory is spotty since we left India when I was not yet seven, but just finding these aerial photos was thrilling nonetheless. Definitely the next best thing to being there.

The second set of pictures is from our block in Detroit where I lived for about ten years. Finding the block on Google Earth was not as startling since I visited there not long before I left for Malaysia and took a number of photos. The aerial view is still neat though. I especially like how the freeway looks so clean and orderly from the sky. How deceptive.