Travels, Books, Stuff...

This is going to be a slightly unfocused entry... I'm playing catch-up with life at the minute.

My trip to the States was fun - largely because the people I was working with were fun. If they hadn't been it would have been pretty awful because it was all work, flights and long drives. I flew London to LA on Friday, went to work on Saturday morning and then flew from LA to Phoenix, Arizona and then Kansas City. On Sunday morning we drove a couple of hours out of the city and had another long day of work. On Monday we flew from Kansas City to Indianapolis. We worked all Tuesday before making a dash for the airport and flying to Dallas. (Tip, don't let a man called Tom programme your GPS... Toms think they know all about Tom Toms and you can end up driving an hour in the wrong direction and not getting to bed until 1am as a result.) We started early on Wednesday with a five hour drive from Dallas to Lubbock and then spent the rest of the day working. Thursday was one of the longest days of my life. I got up at 5am and left the hotel at 5.30. Another five hour drive saw me in Dallas where I boarded a plane bound for Boston where I scooted across the airport just in time to board another flight... this one to London. We landed at 5.20am on Friday. It feels like I went from 5am one day to 5am the next without experiencing a night time. Odd. And discombobulating. And you can see how liking the company of the people you're with - and the work that you're doing - becomes important in such circumstances.

I'll tell you more about the work another time. And I'll be visiting climatecare.org to carbon neutralise the trip some time this week. (I know, I know... it probably does more good for my conscience than the world but...)

I wasn't in any time zone for long so I never really acclimatised to the situation but I've still been a bit wobbly on the other side of it. I've been getting a bit yawny at around 4pm each day and managed to fall asleep bolt upright at my desk yesterday - albeit for only 10 minutes.

Having had only the weekend to recover I was straight back to work on Monday with the book event at Foyles. I'm really glad we did this event this way. It was done to create some video-podcasts about the America Unchained book for the Guardian website. The original idea was just to film me doing a sit-down interview with someone but I think those things can come across as quite dry and formal. Doing it with an audience - and taking their questions (instead of the questions dreamed up by your own publicist) made it more exciting for me and more fun all round. Given how tired I was during the afternoon it was good to have an audience to kick me out of it and give me the much needed adrenaline rush. The idea had been to assemble an audience of around 70 people. Normally when you do a free event there's a relatively large number of no-shows where people take tickets and don't use them... which almost never happens when they've shelled out actual money for them. With that in mind they oversubscribed it a little and gave away 100 tickets. I think three people didn't make it. Anyway, it was really enjoyable for me and a nice way to warm up for the impending book tour that starts soon. I'll let you know as soon as the videos from the night are put online...

The book isn't published until April 3 (but can be pre-ordered now, natch) and so I took a copy of my last A4 manuscript version with me to read from. But as it goes the publishers had rushed a hot-off-the-presses version to the shop so that the real thing was there. Seeing a printed book for the first time is always an exciting moment. Until then you don't really know how thick it's going to be, how it will feel in people's hands and so on. It's the moment at which all of the hard graft or writing is translated into something real. I'm very happy with it. It feels cared for and the colour photos lend it a richness that isn't common these days. Hurrah.

And then on Tuesday I saw rather more of them. A thousand of them as it goes. I went out to a depot in Essex to sign them for various book shops who've ordered some signed stock. It's events like this that destroy one's signature. Try writing the same thing - anything - over and over a thousand times...

Tonight I'll be recording an episode of Clive Anderson's Chat Room for Radio 4. It's about the week's news... I feel woefully under-prepared. I haven't really engaged with the real world this week - there hasn't been time. I'm sure some stuff happened involving a person and some other people and some stuff. Oh dear.


EDITED: To remove the gobbledygook random code that somehow made it's way in mid-word and also to say that Clive Anderson's Chat Room is actually on Radio 2 not 4 (I wasn't the only person who made this mistake, the audience's tickets all said Radio 4 too.) It goes out tonight (Thursday 20th) at 11pm and is repeated on Saturday also.

#109

I'm enjoying Scottsdale much more than I enjoyed Aurora... but then that isn't difficult. This is a truly beautiful part of the world and I took the opportunity on Monday to drive out to a town called Sedona and to visit Slide Rock Creek. I've seen this landscape before, but only in a Roadrunner cartoon. It really is spectacular. And the 150 mile drive was better than a day of mini-golf.

The city of Scottsdale also offers plenty to see and do... and here's some love from me to you.

The shows are going well here also with a great venue that really fits the show and two great audiences so far. People had warned me about discussing Creationism here as it's perceived by others as being a place where Creationism is likely to be rife. But so far, that part of the show has gone over really well and without the awkwardness that I sometimes perceived in Cleveland, say.

Maybe I've subtly adjusted how I deliver this show over the last few weeks to account for the potential to offend or maybe the people of Scottsdale are just more comfortable with the subject being discussed. Maybe they're aware that other parts of America think they're more likely to be Creationists and so enjoy the opportunity to demonstrate with a chuckle that they're not. Or maybe tonight the audience will storm out in protest and I've just been lucky so far.

I had a surprise waiting for me after the show last night in the shape of yet another Dave Gorman. He's the 109th namesake that I've now met. It seems so odd to me that so many years after I stopped looking for them they continue to come and find me. I was originally trying to find 54 (one for every card in the deck, including the jokers) and once I'd achieved that, naturally, I stopped looking. I completed a second deck's worth back in April in Toronto, and now, I guess a third deck has been started. It was a pleasure to meet him and here we are.

Cleveland

There are another couple of reviews of the Cleveland shows. The Free Times summarises the show, almost forgets to say whether he likes it or not, reviews the seating in the theatre (he's right though, the cabaret style seating is a huge annoyance and completely inappropriate to my show) but finally adds that the show is good enough that you will forget that you're in a strange and uncomfortably arranged seat. Scene is a bit more quotable describing it as a "sides splitting journey" and a "cracking good time". Both have been added to the reviews page.

My recent rock and pebble balancing has inspired me to try more. The pebble balancing is much harder. When you pick up a rock you have much more sense of its gravity and weight but the pebbles are so slight and it needs a far steadier hand.

I went to a park with a friend and between us we built a veritable stone-henge of miniature structures. I was quite happy with this stack although there's no way of knowing that it is built out of tiny pebbles - in the photo it could be six feet tall rather than under two inches.

However, a caterpillar lends some nice perspective to this one... unless of course you think there are giant caterpillars roaming around the parks in Cleveland in which case, yes, that stack could also be huge. I was going to call this photo Pillar but my pebble-stacking friend suggested I call it Graduation instead which is much better.

Time off

I've been very happy with the way the show has gone down in Cleveland so far. I seemed to do 4 or 5 interviews a day all through the first week and the reviews of the show have been great and it's gone down really well most nights with 2 or 3 standing ovations along the way but, even with all that on its side, we haven't exactly set the box office alight.

It seems I'm being stalked by vicars. The last two shows both had men of the cloth sitting on the front row - which seems like an unlikely incidence. I asked them both about their views on Creationism, one declined to really answer but the other told me in no uncertain terms that he was Creationist.

I'm not used to meeting this opinion... I've spoken to several men who share their profession in the UK, both during and after the show (and outside the confines of the theatre as well) and never found any of them to be of the Creationist persuasion. It's such a minority point of view at home that it is very difficult to take seriously.

All through the last show, my paranoid mind was thinking that that day's vicar had been sent especially to check the show out because word of the show's anti-creationist material was out. (In actual fact, I'm very careful in the show to point out that it is the lie I believe I was told and the failure to whack his Google that actually earned my ire, not the belief in Creationism. One of the other people I met in the journey was also a Creationist... he's read the book and seen the show and we remain friends, so I'm confident that I've made this point clear in the show. But paranoia can always get you when you're on stage. I'll start an official vicar-watch and let you know if any more turn up.

I tried to maximise my time off, so when the Sunday show was over I jumped in a car and headed out of the city for a bit of a break in Port Clinton about 70 miles west of Cleveland. It was good to get out of the city and into some fresh country air. Being by Lake Erie it provided me with another opportunity for rock-balancing. (see September 8th and September 10th)

I managed this stack which was okay but I don't think my heart was in it and the result is somehow a little unsatisfactory.

On the way home, I stopped in a small and pretty town called Vermilion and visited the beach. I decided to try balancing some pebbles instead (maybe, I can market this as Pocket-Rock-Balancing!) and achieved a Zen-like calm in building this inch-tall stack.

With my new sense of calm I then tried again with bigger stones and was very happy with this triptych.
The middle of these was particularly satisfying as the top stone would move constantly in the breeze but seemed like it would stay in place for ever. It was certainly still there when I left the area a couple of hours later and returned to Cleveland for tonight's show.

Guardian column

I'm going to be writing a short weekly article about touring the States for the Guardian. Initially I refused to do this until they agreed to change the size and design of their paper but I'm told they have finally complied with my demands and so I've written my first piece. I think the articles will run on Saturdays and I think the first one will be in this week.

There's another good review - this time from the Akron Beacon Journal. I've added it to the reviews page. While it's a positive review it ends with something a little odd:

My only concern is this: Once the press started writing about Gorman and friends' googlewhacks, references to those particular word combinations started showing up on numerous Web sites, making their unique googlewhack status null and void. So as Gorman tells his story in his current show, how does he show the googlewhacks as single Google results on his laptop?

He may be taking creative license with his PowerPoint graphics. Or, maybe he captured the Web pages of single Google results years ago, after he and his pals found the unique word combinations and before the rest of the world knew about them.

What an odd concern to have. Surely it's obvious that the last sentence explains the situation perfectly ... in fact it's the only rational way it could have happened. The rest of the world (well, not all of them) only knew about the googlewhacks because of the show... so obviously the show existed first and that included the images. Her concern only seems to make sense if there is a way in which my story could be known by the world without me being the one who's telling it. How odd? It's hardly a chicken-and-egg style mystery is it?

Plain Dealing

The second show here in Cleveland seemed to go over well but I was frustrated because I felt let down by many technical things and I know that had they gone right the audience would have had a better time.

Another event had taken place in the theatre that afternoon and it seems that some settings on the projector and on the desk had been reset. This meant the images didn't have the quality they should for a professional show and the sound effects that accompany the pictures were incredibly quiet too. There were a few times where I couldn't hear the sound effect so didn't know if the image had changed or not and had to have a sneaky look behind me to check rather than just rattling along with the show.

If the images don't arrive with snap and clarity in a show like this it's like a stand-up comedian mumbling his punchlines... the audience still have all the information to find the humour but it just isn't as funny. Very frustrating.

15 minutes before the end of the show the sound failed completely so I was off mic for a while. It's a show that's already quite damaging to my voice so I was worried about the damage I might do to myself trying to fill the room without amplification but when you're in full flow there's not a lot of choice and you just have to carry on.

It made for a rather odd ending. When the show ends, the lights come up and some music plays and people take their cue and leave. Of course with no sound there was no music and even though the show was clearly over and the house lights were up some of the audience found themselves sitting watching an empty stage for a while. I'm not sure what they thought was about to happen. Hmmm.

There is a good review in Cleveland's main paper, The Plain Dealer this morning though... the full thing is on the reviews page but here's the pull quote the pr people will want to use:

"I can urge you to get out of the house and away from your computer (as far away as possible, if you know what's good for you) and to get to the theater to bear witness to one of the most whimsical, profane and marvellous evenings"

The key word being "something"

Cleveland is a much bigger city than Napa and with much more media available it means I have a much heavier schedule of interviews - and hopefully - bigger crowds as a result. This morning I did a series of interviews on a bunch of radio stations that you'd only really find in America.

Starting at just after 7am I was on WMMS (Rock) then WGAR (Country) then WTAM (Talk) and WMVX (Mix) - all within a space of 90 minutes before travelling to WKYC - the local NBC affiliate for a TV show called Good Company. And I hope I was. Even if I was looking like a scruffy tourist.

The show did get off to a good start on the first night. There was a nicely fullish house and generally there was a great reaction. There was definitely some discomfort in the room when I was discussing Creationism although I can't quite work out the nature of it. But it didn't seem to do the overall reaction any harm and there was something of a standing ovation at the end.

Condiments

I wrote yesterday about the rare pleasure of a home-cooked meal while on tour so you can imagine my delight on arriving at my Cleveland hotel this evening to discover a kitchen! It's not the best kitchen in the world but at least it means that some simple food can be rustled up now and again. And that a 3am sandwich is available. And toast. This is exciting.

As there's a kitchen there are also some basics - such as salt and pepper - provided. Now, if you were trying to give weary travellers the feel of home, would you choose to give them salt and pepper pots or would you make do with those tiny sachets of individual servings? It's a difficult choice isn't it? Perhaps this is the ideal solution. The mind boggles.

The joy of home cooked food

My break in San Francisco is almost at an end - I fly to Cleveland tomorrow where the tour continues. I'd almost forgotten that there was a reason I was in the US.

On August 28th I wrote about the show being visited by one of the googlewhacks that I met in the adventure. The reason that David and Danielle (aka Unicyclist Periscopes) were able to get out to the show in Napa is that they no longer live in Washington D.C. having moved to Palo Alto which is not far from San Francisco.

This also meant I got to spend some more time with them during my break. We visited a baseball game (v. exciting) and I also headed out to Palo Alto for my first home-cooked meal of the tour (even more exciting) and a trip to the cinema to see the wildly funny and liberatingly rude Aristocrats.

This won't mean a great deal to you unless you've seen the show or read the book but I was really delighted when Danielle presented me with a second Teeny Google.

She seems to have an uncanny knack for spotting these things in unlikely places (this one was alone in a stationery store where the owner had no recollection of having ordered it) or maybe the world has an uncanny knack of placing these in her path shortly before we meet.

Today as I walked along the coast I found myself at the spot of my first rock-balancing and decided to have another go. I doubt I'll ever be able to balance things with the beauty that Bill Dan manages but I was still quite impressed with this stack - the second from the top was really quite small and difficult to place.

Maybe I'll give everything up and start a new life as a rock-balancer. Or maybe I won't.

San Francisco

I'm enjoying my break in San Francisco. I cycled over the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito the other day where I saw a man called Bill Dan balancing rocks on the shoreline. It's really beautiful. The next day I felt compelled to have a go at some rock-balancing myself. I managed this stack of five which isn't anywhere near as beautiful but was very satisfying all the same.

Napa no more

Well that's the first venue on the US tour done with and what an enjoyable two weeks it's been. The venue was terrific and we were made very welcome. It wasn't always the fullest of theatres but the audience reaction has been very rewarding and there's been some good press. More importantly the size of the houses was steadily increasing through the two weeks which is certainly better than the other way round. It seems from the conversations I had after the show that people were mostly coming because of friend's recommendation.

I was rather skeptical about doing a Sunday matinee because 2pm on Sunday doesn't feel like a particularly funny part of the day but today's audience were really up for it and it was a lot of fun.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of touring the show in the States is that it gives so many of the people involved in the story the chance to see the show live for the first time and, of course, we get the chance to catch up. Several of the Googlewhacks came to see the show in New York, more came in LA and I'm delighted to say that today I was visited by Unicyclist Periscopes... otherwise known as David and Danielle. It's always a little odd telling the story when one of the participants is there in person but in a nice way. Things seem to take on an extra resonance when the audience don't just have to take my word for it but can confirm for themselves that the person I'm showing them on the screen is sitting amongst them nodding away. It was great to see them again.

I now have a short break before the tour resumes in Cleveland on September 13th.

Napa

My day off was spent visiting wineries and, of course, tasting wine. The Nicholson Ranch, Peju and Francis Ford Coppola's winery Niebaum-Coppola were all fascinating and showed us great hospitality.

Letters

I went for a wine class at the Goosecross Winery yesterday which was great. On Monday I'll be spending my day off visiting several wineries and I'm glad I did this first as I'll know a little more about what to look for.

The show has gone up a couple of gears. I was concerned about the ending losing some of its power but I think I've solved it by adding a few images at the end that seem to make the facts clearer and now everyone seems to get the information at the same time instead of in dribs and drabs. It's odd that if an audience find something funny but they each do so in their own moment it loses any punch. But if the whole audience come to the realisation at the same time it feels really funny. But how do they know that everyone else is getting it? How does this atmosphere make itself known? Hmmm.

The audiences have been smallish so far but the reaction has been great. There was a review in the local paper - The Napa Valley Register - which I've added to the reviews page which was nice enough although they largely told the reader what the show is about and neglected to say much about whether or not they liked it and why.

Perhaps the best review came, not from the paper's critic but from a local B&B owner, who wrote to the local paper. I won't add this to the review page because... well because while it was in the paper it wasn't a review... but if you removed the words "Dear editor" it would be a doozy:

Dear editor,

The Napa Valley Opera House sometimes seems too small, too intimate. Take the recent opening performance of Dave Gorman's "Googlewhack Adventure," a one-man show. Gorman, a British comedian, here for a two-week run, is just hugely funny. He's nearly too big for the stage.

Gorman's performance is to funny what a water drop is to the Niagara Falls, what the first spark was to the big bang, and what the first step is to a journey around the world. If this description and these word associations don't communicate how much fun you'll have listening to Gorman's story, let me try this: Your life will be meaningless and utterly sad unless you see him.

It's not that he's just that funny. He is. It's not that he's more energizing than a Starbucks Grande Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino with a double espresso. He is. It's not that he's just brilliant. He clearly is. It's all this and more. He's what every live one-man show must be: Completely captivating. He holds your attention throughout an hour and a half (plus!) of non stop rant. And he does it with a British accent!

This show is not for people with poor hearing. Nor is it suited for the stupid, like the person whose cell phone went off twice during the performance! It's not that we've not heard a cell phone's ring (chime, chatter, song etc.) before, we all have. But it's seldom that it becomes part of the evening's performance. Gorman handled it brilliantly! The incidents' minor ripple was lost in a sea of laughter when Gorman politely reminded the cell phone owner that it would only happen again if they didn't turn it off! It did. The rest of us wanted to pummel the culprit. Miles of smiles later, we found ourselves on our feet clapping and shouting Gorman's praises. It's amazing what one very talented, funny man in an intimate theater can do. Now, go! See him, before it's too late for you. You've been warned. Go!

Jim Beazley

Beazley House

I wish Jim Beazley was the Napa Valley Register theater critic and Sasha Paulsen ran a B&B.

Strep

I had an early start yesterday morning in order to do an interview in San Fransisco on KFOG. Luckily it was fun to do.

The second show went better than the first, smoother and more consistently performed... although I am going to spend today looking at the ending. It's always been one of the most powerful parts of the show and twice here it seems to have lacked something although I can't quite put my finger on what.

Time makes me forget quite how physically demanding the show is. My throat is already raw so I'm having to do all the usual things to look after it. I have to cut out coffee (difficult), dairy (okay) and have almost no alcohol (in Napa!)

Tour

I haven't performed the show for nearly 4 months now so while the story still feels like it happened to me yesterday, the intricacies of how I normally tell it have faded dangerously far from my memory. There's no script as such - I've never written anything down on paper for any of the shows - so it's a process of looking through the powerpoint presentation and listening to a recording that helps to lodge it back in my head.

With that in mind I'm delighted with the way the first night went in Napa. I was a beat or two off on things on a few occasions - I was probably having to concentrate too much on knowing it to be fully in the moment for performing it - but all in all it was a good solid start.

When I performed the show in New York it took a few shows to find its feet and for me to get the tone right. When it started to go really well there, there were people who'd say, "Of course it goes well here, we're New Yorkers, we're smart..."

When I then took the show to LA I had a few people say, "You won't find it as easy in LA. They won't concentrate as well and follow a story... they're not as much a theatre crowd as New York" which proved to be nonsense. If anything the LA audience were by and large more effusive than the average NYC crowd.

Before the show opened in Napa I had a few people offering words of advice along the lines of, "You'll have to remember that this is a small town. This isn't New York or LA... the crowds here are more conservative and you might find it harder to get them to go with you" and again it seems to me to be nonsense.

I only have the evidence of one show so far so I won't be complacent and I'm sure in a tour of this scale I'll have a few hard nights along the way, but the idea that people here just aren't as equipped as others to get something seems a bit patronising. It's also a dangerous idea to plant in a performer's mind.

If I take to the stage in Napa thinking that I have to dumb the show down, sanitise it or change it in anyway to account for some mythical small town sensibility then I won't end up giving the best performance. I'm convinced that these things can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Flight

When the papers are full of stories of chaos and abandoned travellers and you turn up at the airport to find a tented village of passengers trying to outdo each other with their stoicism it saps the spirit a little bit. But it seems I'm one of the lucky ones. My flight was one of the estimated 40% that took off as normal yesterday and all was fine. In fact, not having to eat airline food on the trip can probably be regarded as something of a bonus. Napa is sunny. So am I.

Here we go.

My US tour starts on Tuesday in Napa, California and so I'm supposed to be flying to San Fransisco tomorrow. From Heathrow. On British Airways. The news is full of stories of cancelled flights and chaos at the airport so that should be a fun way to start the tour.