“I’ve always had a problem with authority. When I was in the third grade at Lake Bluff Elementary School just outside Milwaukee, my teacher, Wanda Rood, knew that I hated to be called by my full name, Gregory. I have always been Greg to my family and friends, and whenever Miss Rood called me Gregory to humiliate or intimidate me, I shook with fury.

Finally, one day when I was talking too much to my friends, Miss Rood said, ‘Gregory, do you have something to say to us all?’ I replied, ‘Don’t call me Gregory, Wanda.’”

Here Greg and I talk about his book and tour. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this project. MUCH more to come:

1. When you started Bad Religion at the age of 15, did you ever imagine the band would be around for 30 years?

As a 15 year old, I didn’t even imagine where I would be in three years, so thirty years was inconceivable. The band started out as a channel for rebelliousness. We were creative non-conformists who relished provocation. We didn’t think there would be much of a future in that.

2. Why do you think your band has had such staying power?

Scientific knowledge has staying power and punk shares certain qualities with science, in particular, challenging dogma. Without the overturning of prior theories, science can’t progress. This was immediately appealing to me as a teenager, as it still is.

3. You write in the book that as a teenager, science kind of saved you. What do you mean by that?

Through my early reading in evolutionary biology and geology, the world began to make sense. I could answer the “big picture” questions that were lacking from my a-religious upbringing. I was never taught about the stories in The Bible. Science offered a fantastical narrative from which I forged my songwriting career, which also began in my teens.

4. What’s the best part about touring?

Visiting antiquarian bookshops all over the world. I spend more money on foreign postage sending books home from tour than I do on meals.

5. Will you promote the book during your tour? (Fans: pre-order here!)

I would like to meet as many people as possible who are interested in evolution and the worldview they take from it. For that reason, I hope to appear in many bookstores, coffee shops, and speaking venues on the same days that we play concerts in cities all over the world. What a privilege, talk about the issues during the day, sing about them at night. It’s a dream come true!

Q: What did you think of Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin as hosts? Dynamic duo or awkward pairing?

A: What’s not to love? Though they did seem under rehearsed and under used, more like mascots than actual hosts. I mean where were they when we needed them most, during the Ben Stiller incident and that horrific horror montage? The host or hosts have the responsibility of making the show feel like an actual event as opposed to a series of loosely connected episodes. This year, the Oscars didn’t have that.

Q: What were your Oscar award predictions and how did they play out? Do you think the usual Oscar award “politics” were at play this year?

A: My Oscar predictions played out pretty much as I thought with the exception of Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress, and Best Foreign Film. I know it’s become fashionable to put down on Jason Reitman, but I thought he (and his collaborators) wrote a terrific script, and were very clever about when and how much they delivered on genre. The Academy loves an 80% old-fashioned movie, and that’s just what Up in the Air is. I can’t say I was that surprised to see Sandra Bullock win the Oscar for Best Actress, considering the Academy’s penchant for honorably discharging Meryl Streep. I never thought I’d say this about the greatest living actress, but I’m actually beginning to feel sorry for her. Julia Child was far from her best, but it was leagues ahead of the others. And finally, I was shocked out of my cummerbund when The White Ribbon lost Best Foreign Film. It was the strongest in the category, and it had all the momentum a winning film could have. Were politics at play? Absolutely. No matter what Mo’Nique says.

Q: Hurt Locker vs. Avatar. The underdog basically stole the show this year. Was the Best Picture win a triumph of story and direction over special effects and beautiful cinematography?

A: The Best Picture win was a triumph of many, many things, aesthetic and otherwise, the most significant of which, as everyone knows, is Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar. But I wouldn’t call either of them an underdog. Both films showcased mind-blowing feats of direction, and both were beautifully shot (though I’m still uncertain about how cinematography fits into Avatar’s largely CGI universe), and well received. The underdog – and to my mind the best picture of the year – was The Coen Brothers’ film, A Serious Man.

Q: The Oscars featured a moving tribute to the films of John Hughes. What do you think it is about his movies that people love so much?

A: John Hughes respected his characters. More than that, he got to the strangeness of being young, and – here’s the feat – he made it relatable. No matter what, Hughes took all of his people seriously, and that, when dealing with teenagers – who are so often marginalized in cinema as well as life – is a wonderful, wonderful thing. He also understood the many kinds of teenagers from the jock to the nerd to the hot girl and onward, types everyone could relate to. It gave his films immediacy. But rather than paint them with broad strokes, Hughes always gave his characters a touch of contradiction or darkness or unforeseen humor that helped them to defy the limitations of their type. That right there is so much of what his films (and growing up) are (is) about: breaking type. People love his films because no matter who they are, Hughes loved them. And when you’re fifteen or sixteen, falling in love, out of love, scared, or alone, that’s no small thing.

Q: Who were the best dressed? Worst dressed? Did you get a swag bag? Who did you get to schmooze with after the show?

A: Sandra Bullock knocked my socks off. If only we had met later, she might have knocked off even more. And Vera Farmiga! VERA! FARMIGA! Holy Mackerel! She looked like a present I wanted to give myself over and over again. After the show, I got to schmooze with the liveliest bunch of rascals in the room, the editors and the documentarians. (Word of advice: at awards shows, always hang out with the editors and the documentarians. Actors are distracted by other people, directors are distracted by themselves, and writers are distracted by the buffet, but editors and the doc-makers are always present. Along with cinematographers, they see the bigger picture.) I quite literally bypassed Charlize on my way to Lynne Littman, Rob Epstein, Richard Pearce, Lynzee Kingman, and Mark Goldblatt. I got no swag. Only the happiest hangover of my life.

Read more about the Oscar’s on Sam Wasson’s blog. His book Fifth Avenue, 5 AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman will publish in July 2010.

Here are 10 signs you might be……….The Peanut Butter:

1) You can’t think of anything to show for your work in the last six months.

2) You think your job is to prevent mistakes from being made.

3) You believe that the more people invited to a meeting, the more successful the meeting will be.

4) Meetings take months to schedule.

5) You would rather be “politically correct” and “cc everyone” than make something great happen.

6) You’re paralyzed by the concept of “scalable.”

7) You think you have the upper hand in nearly all business dealings , but deep down inside, in those quiet moments late at night, you know you’re losing “control.”

8 ) You resort to bullying tactics to get your way without ever considering what might benefit everyone.

9) You spend your days trying to figure out how to gain control.

10) You’re an information hoarder.

At home, where he writes, he no longer has internet access. A four-month stint with wi-fi proved “deadly” for his productivity and having no access at all ensures that he is not tempted to “look at Kajagoogoo videos and old ads for Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum” on YouTube. “Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you’re called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can’t ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn’t written anything for a year.

Cut to this week when I have been asked for more FREE things than I ever remember. In one week, I received the following requests:

• Dozens of people (media, bloggers, and everyday ordinary folk) have asked for FREE tickets to a conference we’re hosting (And by the way, this conference business is supposed to be a revenue source because everyone wants their books for FREE these days. Turns out they want conferences for free too.).

• A TV Show wants 140 FREE books for the audience members. This seems to be a standard request these days. I’ve never quite understood how the author and publisher benefit from this, but it is practically expected.

• A blogger asked me for 100 copies of an author’s book for FREE to give away to his readers. He was writing a review. After much deliberation and hesitation, I agreed to 50 copies, which still seemed extreme to me.

At first I was appalled, and then I realized that maybe this is The Economics of Integrity…and maybe I should be going back to these requesters and making my own counter-requests…and maybe this is how the new economy works.

Okay, so. Amazing, right? I was absolutely stunned when I watched that video the first time, and I didn’t even comprehend that it was a site takeover until I watched the entire page swirl back into the salsa jar at the end. I had to watch it again (and again, and again) to catch the genius animation that snuck onto the screen, from the vines that creep up from the bottom to the slicing up of the Vimeo logo when the girl steps out of the frame to dance around the background. It’s interesting how much I have to force my brain to see the subtle shifting of the video frame and background zoom-in, since it didn’t even register the first few times I watched. This was more than an advertisement…viewing this was an experience. And even though I don’t like tomatoes or site takeovers, dang it if I don’t want to crack open a jar of salsa right now.

But aside from making me really hungry, the video also made me think of how certain media is presented to allow for an experience, to make the technology behind it disappear. That oh-so-smooth transition from “video on a video hosting website” to “Salsa Show!” was clutch to making me view this as more than a 40-second clip about a vegetable I really couldn’t care less about and something I wanted to click away from. Movie theaters are certainly designed to be invisible, and I think physical books are as well, providing only the turn of a page as the sole interruption between the written word and the reader’s imagination. Even then, that interruption is the mark of a good book: a “page-turner.” With the boom of electronic reading devices, it’s important to keep this feature in mind; which device will allow you to have an experience with a book, to make you want that salsa and nothing else, and then give it to you?

In the ramp-up to the iPad announcement, the internet ate up every little rumor and spit out post upon post of speculation about the features, capabilities, and technical specifications of the mythical creature. Then both during and after the event, many found themselves underwhelmed by the lack of glitter (No flash! No camera! That name!). Adam Frucci over at Gizmodo listed 8+ things that suck about the iPad, considering the lack of multitasking to be “a backbreaker.” But Joanne McNeil argues for the lack of multitasking in both the iPad and other devices because it solidifies the reading experience. The New York Times’s David Carr, as well as Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball, also noted the iPhone and iPad’s ability to, as gadgets, disappear, leaving as little as a finger swipe (page turn) between the user and the content. Similarly, while the Kindle can’t do much else, it certainly lets you read. What others may consider faults in these devices, readers should appreciate as features for creating a reading experience.

Now, as for what content is necessary for an experience, I’m not sure. That’s a whole ‘nother ballpark, but I think Kassia Kroszer hits one over the fence with her “What Are Enhanced Ebooks?” post. Now that we have the technology that allows us to create such enhancements and focus on them when reading, we need to actually deliver good salsa.

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter that there wasn’t much new to learn at this year’s Tools of Change conference. In fact I heard the same things said about Digital Book World. I don’t know…..that’s not at all what I take away from these things. I attend a lot of conferences, even ones that have nothing to do with publishing. In fact, one of my all time favorites was Brad Inman’s Real Estate conference.

But here’s the thing, I don’t go expecting to take away some big revelation, and what I’ve learned over the years is that the lessons often take time to marinate and reveal themselves, and I don’t even know what I learned until weeks or months later. Also, for me, it’s every bit as much about the networking and connecting in the real world as it is about the lectures and panels. I firmly believe that magic can happen when you bring interesting people together face to face; the potency of that real world connection can’t be replicated virtually.

The other lesson (which I learned before, but was confirmed for me here) is that the least likely talks that I stumble into by accident are often the most interesting. This year, I fell into Brian O’Leary and Ashley Gordon’s talk about Print On Demand and it got me thinking in directions I had never considered……and the only reason I found myself there was because the Twitter room was too crowded. It was the most thought provoking hour of the week for me and I’m sure will lead me in directions I never imagined.

A lot of people are headed to SXSW this year and are asking me which panels to attend — and I’m going to give a big plug here for serendipity. I’ll be trying to steer myself clear of the obvious and will be looking to discover the magic in the least likely places. I’ll be the one looking to swim in a different pond. My favorite panel from last year had nothing to do with publishing, per se. It was called something to the effect of “How the Brain Works” by a lawyer named Craig Ball, and subsequently changed the way I give presentations (and as an aside, not to dis anyone specifically…..but I think others in our industry could benefit from what Craig Ball has to say). Another panel by YouTube star Felicia Day was hugely informative for me too — and I stumbled into it by accident.

Here are a few quick & dirty observations from TOC:

• There were many more laptops than I saw at DWB
• In France, all books are priced exactly the same, wherever they are sold. It’s the law. (Wow. That blew me away. Can you imagine? That changes everything for everyone). Check out Julia’s post from last Fall.
• Peter Meyers is a visionary. I don’t know if all of his ideas will “work” — but he has really done some deep thinking about what a “book” can be.
• Everyone needs to hear Kirk Biglione’s presentation about the history of DRM. I’m not sure I agree 100% with everything he says about how it should be in the future, but it is very informative to hear a detailed history of what happened to the music industry.
• Tim O’Reilly says get back to work. Stop trying to be so “visionary” and work on the meat and potatoes of great book publishing.
• Brad Inman said that trying to make stuff happen with big publishers is like trying to swim through a jar of peanut butter. I love that. I’ve been saying the same thing for years — but I call it the “sludge.” You have a great idea, and then you’ve got to swim through the sludge to try to make it happen. Not a lot of fun. I’ve learned to dodge and weave and bob my way around it. From now on, every time I think to myself “how do I make this happen” — it’s going to be symbolized by a big jar of Skippy.

All in all, I loved TOC 2010. I signed up for next year before I left the conference center.