Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Erica Parrott
It can feel dirty just like it does when you forget that you left that High Society open to a particularly raunchy exchange or accidentally left some piece of Chasey Lain cinema in the VCR. Rosy cheeks…stammering. You’re feeling like a young air guitarist, believe it or not.

“I remember standing on my bed and playing all four sides of the vinyl of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall.’ I became part of the band. I would sing along and play and fall into some other rock world,” Dan “Bjorn Turoque” Crane said. “I remember my brother would come into the room and it was almost like being caught masterbating. It was letting that nakedness out.”

Before Crane became infatuated with the world of competitive air guitar, he never fully realized how many others – people just like himself—were ensconced in the everyday world, muting their inner shredding, their sick phantom licks because societal normals frown on publicly displaying the Eddie Van Halen within. He didn’t see them, for the telltale signs and the tipoffs just weren’t that recognizable with his own nose and sensors. But he walked among them. They flew low and most inconspicuously, concealing their plectrums and letting reality take care of the rest, for even an owl’s exemplary eyesight couldn’t register their signature instrument as an instrument at all. The rampant population of AC/DC grinders, who enjoyed pretending as much as anything, was latent.

“Now, I see people air guitaring all the time,” Crane said. “It’s like when you’re shopping for a particular new car and you start seeing them all over the place. If I see someone playing air guitar, I feel a connection to that person.”

Crane, who writes about music, food and culture for the New York Times, Slate and the Los Angeles Times, christened himself Bjorn Turoque in 2002, when he first discovered the World Air Guitar Championships, held annually in Finland. He took an activity that is primarily a personal and slightly embarrassing thing out from behind closed doors and at times when it was guaranteed no one was looking and decided to go for the gusto. His new book “To Air Is Human” (no air guitarist will ever be able to claim a better title should they too write a book about their obsessive hobby) has a cover packed with blurbs from notables such as “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” author Malcolm Gladwell, “Motherless Brooklyn” author Jonathan Lethem and “The Areas of My Expertise” author John Hodgman and it chronicles Turoque’s agonizing travails. These tough times come in the forms of runner-up finishes and heartbreak. He just can’t lift himself free of a world of perpetual second place finishes to men with names like The Rockness Monster and C-Diddy. The book, with self-help diagrams (the most helpful of which shows the correct procedure for maximizing the illusion of smoke using dry ice, a turkey baster and zippered wrist bands) and quotations from Friedrich Nietzsche (such as “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you” and “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication”), is a captivating piece of writing that really does explore intoxication, both alcoholic and psychological. Crane became a different soul when he was on stage, tearing into his favorite Bags song or his cut-and-pasted Led Zeppelin medley, and the book delves into the firm clutches air guitar (as crazy as it sounds – it’s as unimaginable as someone needing and wanting candy circus peanuts without any cease fire) can hold a person by.

“We all know this is ridiculous, but we take it so seriously,” Crane said. “It’s about committing oneself to a dream and giving over to it. It just happens. It’s no weirder than a bunch of guys on a diamond, hitting a ball with a stick. My girlfriend and I would get into fights about air guitar. I would be sitting there at night, thinking about what song I would do at a certain competition and she would be like, ‘Dude, you have to let this go. This is enough already,’ and I would say, ‘Listen, this is what I do now.’

“My dad was just kind of confused by it. He would say, ‘Are you making money doing this?’ The thing was, I kept coming so close to winning that I must have some talent for this. It was like there was some girl who wouldn’t talk to me so I just kept chasing her. I think if it was a triathlon or I was an Olympic athlete, it would have gotten really hard to take. It would have been devastating, but at its heart, it was inherently ridiculous that I kept getting second place. Eventually, they became kind of funny. When I got second at Worlds last year, I just kind of shook my head and thought, ‘It’s kind of perfect. It’s the story of my life.’”

“Air Guitar Nation,” a documentary about air guitar, prominently featuring the now-retired competitor Crane, was the winner of the audience award at the South By Southwest Film Festival and was an official selection at the Tribeca, Silverdocs, Full Frame, Britdoc and Edinburgh festivals before being hand-chosen by Michael Moore for his Traverse City Film Festival early in August. Bjorn Turoque, as it was revealed on his blog, finally beat his nemesis C-Diddy. It didn’t matter that it was in miniture golf. A win is a win and some would argue that it’s a more glorious feat.

“Apparently, Michael Moore’s just a big fan of the film,” Crane said. “Oddly enough, air guitar’s still a big part of my life. I still talk about it every day. It doesn’t happen very often that I’ll get recognized, but I was out last week walking down the street and a guy from across the courtyard shouted, ‘Bjorn,’ and gave me the devil horns. Then he did a little shredding. It’s not going to ever get to the point where there are so many people doing that. If someone shreds to me, I can shred back and I will, happily.”

Bjorn Turoque