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Aug 12, 2010 The New Pornographers By Kathryn Calder

(Under the Radar’s Summer 2010 Issue is a special issue named the Wasted on the Youth Issue that features musicians and actors talking about their childhood memories and things they loved when they were kids. We’re also posting web-exclusive essays that were not printed in the issue, including this one by The New Pornographers’ Kathryn Calder.)

When I was around five or six years old, my family and I would go up to my maternal grandparents’ house on the weekends to visit. It was in the country and so we really had to entertain ourselves. My brother and I would hang around and play this game we called Knight Rider, which was (very) loosely based on the TV show of the same name starring Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) and his rad, black, talking car named KITT. I would be Michael and my older brother would be KITT (or vice versa, it’s so hard to remember), and the game goes like this. (Stay with me here, it’s a bit like a strange dream.)

We would speak in gibberish, which was of course our own made up language because we were actually aliens, on an alien planet, and we’d pretend that I was a singer in an alien band (fitting), and we’d somehow defeat the evil “Boogie Man In the Closet” (which was also the hit single, and, from what I remember, our only single). Reading this back, there seem to be a lot of holes in the story. For example, I really can’t remember what role my brother played and why exactly we were named KITT and Michael, and what we were trying to accomplish, but there you go… I remember we watched the show often, but all I can really recall is that KITT would zoom backwards off a ramp out of the semi-truck while the semi-truck was driving, and that there were lots of leather jackets. And I now have the theme song stuck in my head.

(Kathryn Calder is a member of both The New Pornographers and Immaculate Machine. She has just released her debut solo album, Are You My Mother?, via the label File Under: Music. Knight Rider was a hit action TV series broadcast from 1982 to 1986 on NBC that indeed featured David Hasselhoff and a talking Trans Am car named KITT.)