Dance Dance Dancing with the Dead

Scored tickets to see Lykke Li at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on March 29th. This happened to be my first concert at the cemetery (The Masonic Lodge to be exact). The building itself was gorgeous! You enter into a lovely outdoor patio with pretty white lights in the trees. There is beautiful tile work in the foyer and the salon upstairs is absolutely old and precious! Lykke performed in a quaint room - lighting against the old heavy and wooden chairs gave the perfect ghostly feel. She opened with "Time Flies". We stomped our feet to "Dance Dance Dance", we swooned to her cover of Kings of Leon's "Knocked Up" and she closed out with a cover of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow".

Before her set I was roaming the grounds, sipping my wine, and encountered Dave perched on a chair at the bottom of the staircase reading "The Oresteia" by Aeschylus which contains the Greek trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides). When Dave was explaining the book to me I had asked if he was reading it for school or for pleasure. One sees a book like that and has flashbacks of college lit class reading. "I know, I know. But the book isn't as heavy as it seems" he explains beneath his wicked 'stache. We had over an hour to kill before the set so he figured he would catch up on some reading. Dave's been to shows here before. The last one he attended was for Iron & Wine. (How did I miss that!) Dave's pre-show reading for Iron & Wine was Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. "I often ride the bus so I always have a book on me and I'm constantly reading. I read before shows, I read before a movie starts. Heck, I will even read during a movie with a mini flashlight if the movie isn't that interesting."


Skeleton in the closet? The last book he's read is Twilight. "I really didn't want to read it but I did because it's one of those books that everyone's been reading so I thought I would see what all the fuss was about. It was almost like a rite of passage. To tell you the truth I didn't like the book one bit but I thought the movie was okay. I actually read the book after I watched the movie. Everyone is always saying how books are always better than the movie but this was an exception. I did think that the movie was pretty faithful to the book though."

Dave prefers to read the classics (double entendre there since he also enjoys ancient Greek works). His favourite book of all time is Lord of the Flies. This was the book that really triggered his love for literature probably because he read it during a time in his life when he was the same age as the characters in the book. The book really affected him and he read it about 3 or 4 times when he was younger. When he was even younger he enjoyed a Shel Silverstein classic, The Giving Tree.

We started talking about the book I am currently reading for my book club, The Graveyard Book and he explained that he enjoyed Neil Gaiman's graphic novels. Also told him about us reading Murakami's Kafka On The Shore and we totally geeked out on our love for Murakami. His personal favourite is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. "I took it with me when I had to go to jury duty a few weeks ago. I started it in the waiting room and ended up reading the 400 pages of it that day - it was that good."

Dave's own book would be about music. "I just like music. Plain and simple." Specifically it would be a book about The Pixies, his favourite band of all time. "I'd also like to write about the punk band Hüsker Dü, a band from Minneapolis where I'm from."


What book did you finish in one sitting because you loved it so much?
What band would you like to write about? Why?