Faking his way into air guitarist record books

Because Dan Crane has for several years played a real guitar in the faux-French indie bands Les Sans Culottes and Nous Non Plus, you might suspect that he would have been content to leave the world of pretend guitar playing to the instrumentally challenged. Wrong.

Performing under the alias Bjorn Turoque (pronounced b-yorn to-rock) since 2003, the New York-based writer and musician has become an air guitar aficionado. After rising through the ranks of long-air’d rockers around the United States, he has twice made it to Oulu, Finland, to compete in the Air Guitar World Championships. In Los Angeles next week to promote his memoirs of the experience -- “To Air Is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist” -- with a reading and signing at Book Soup, Crane is hosting the perfect after-party: an evening of “aireoke.”

“I came up with the idea for aireoke when I first went to Finland in 2003,” Crane says. “There was a party after one of the competitions, and everybody was rocking out at the same time, with all their air guitars in full effect. And I just thought, ‘What if we take the competitive aspect out of air guitar and merge it with the idea of karaoke so everybody can pick a song, get up and do their own performance?’ ”

Crane calls the event -- in which audience members are invited to select a song from his iPod and take the stage with their own invisible axes -- “an orgy of insanity.”

-- Liam Gowing

Aireoke, Plush Lounge at the Key Club, 9039 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 9 p.m. Monday. $15. (310) 274-5800. www.aireoke.com. Book signing and reading, Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 7 p.m. Monday. Free.