A couple weeks ago, madness ensued as the staff of Six Apart tried to guess Kurt Loder's age. The topic of Kurt Loder came up when I asked a certain member of the team whether he had read Loder's book, Bat Chain Puller: Rock & Roll in the Age of Celebrity, since it apparently had a section devoted to the paradox that is Prince1.
Guesses ranged from mid-forties to early fifties. After consulting IMDB we found out that Kurt Loder was in fact 60 years old! (well, actually 59, but 60 sounds better). Completely flabbergasted, I felt that it was my noble calling to repeatedly say "Kurt Loder is 60 years old!" to everyone who came into the office that day.
In college, I took a modern literary theory in which we studied the Russian Formalist, Viktor Shklovsky and defamiliarization. In a nutshell, defamiliarization is the act of renewing our awareness and perception of things that have become mundane. So, for example, the way we live, we will see a tree and that triggers our minds to recognize the tree, but we never truly see the tree. Defamiliarization would illuminate that tree in some novel way so that it break the mold of common perception.
Or at least that's what I remember from school.
Anway, that above paragraph is not completely random. Kurt Loder is that tree that we simply see and register as Kurt Loder but never take in account that we're looking at a 60 year-old man on MTV. I've seen Kurt Loder on television hundreds of time, but I'd be hard pressed to describe what he looks like. I know if I saw him in person, I wouldn't know it.
Anyway, if you didn't know it already, Kurt Loder is 60!
1 One of the perks of a company growing in size is that internally, we now have two Prince super-fans on staff and this reference may or not refer to Anil. But, yes it is Anil.
