Stephen and I had to come to a very painful decision this morning: we have to postpone the conference. Some of the money that we had counted on has not been forthcoming and not enough people have put in paper proposals. As of this morning, we have 54 proposals. Realistically, we need 200 to make the conference viable.

This is a bitter disappointment but we felt it was better to announce the postponement as early as possible rather than drag things out. We will regroup and make plans to hold the conference (perhaps scaled down) in 2009.

Many thanks for your support and your interesting comments on this blog.

PB

The conference organisers are very happy to announce that the plenary speakers for Punk 2008 are Johnny Green, heyday manager of The Clash and punk author, and Vancouver's Joe Keithley of DOA.

Johnny Green's literary work includes the seminal A Riot of Our Own (1999) and the current Push Yourself Just a Little Bit More: Backstage at the Tour De France.

[From Joyce Millman] Clash fans will remember Green as the tall guy in studious horn rims who was always bounding onto the stage to adjust the Clash's guitars or to pull excited fans off the lead singer, Joe Strummer. With Garry Barker, a freelance journalist, Green has written an engaging if messy memoir of life at the height of the band's powers, from 1977, just after the release of their first album in England, to 1980, when he quit in exhaustion during an American tour. A bookish punk fan with degrees in Arabic and Islamic studies, Green had been pulled into the Clash's orbit at the comparatively mature age of 27 when they asked him to help work a spotlight at a gig; he ended up as a combination workhorse and nursemaid, hauling their equipment, brewing their tea .... and washing out their socks in his hotel-room sink.

Following Johnny Green, Joe Keithley--troublemaker, voice and practical conscience of Punk, and musical bloodstream with DOA--will address himself to the 2008 Conference, with DOA to play live on the Saturday evening. Joe's Sudden Death Records began in 1978 with the EP (how well I remember it) "Disco Sucks" (which it does.)

These are strong, authentic & valuable voices framing the understanding of Punk and continuing its note of independence in year 2008.

I've finally gotten around to updating the website. You'll now find the CFP on a separate page. More importantly, I've created a page for conference accommodation. It lists a variety of hotels and hostels, in various price ranges, within walking distance of the conference site. My next job is to get the registration portal up and running. Watch for it.

PB

Spent an hour yesterday with local photographer Bev Davies in the Jem Gallery on Broadway. She showed me the pictures she took of the Vancouver and international punk scene in the late 70s and early 80s. A good number of these images have shown up on CD covers and Bev produces an annual punk calendar with the pics. We are going to try to arrange a showing of her pics at the conference. She also floated the idea of giving all delegates a copy of her calendar. If we have the funding, we'll try.

PB

Reading over that issue of Spin on the thirtieth anniversary of punk, I was most struck by the article by Anthony Bourdain, the New York chef turned author. His essay is a nice corrective to the ersatz nostalgia that has sprung up around the 1970s, the era that gave birth to punk. Fueled by fluff like "That 70s Show," this nostalgia recasts the 70s as an era of big hair, disco, and fun. As Bourdain rightly points out, it was anything but. The 1970s were the nadir of the 20th century. Disco was mind-sucking and ugly. I know. I spent the summer of 1975 working at an all-night disco on Toronto's Yonge Street. The fashions were beyond absurd. And the streets of big cities like Toronto and New York were filled with a palpable menace. Punk was born out of desperation of young people who did not want to wear smiley buttons and listen to their parents' music, people for whom the "peace and love" mantra of the previous generation, the demographically enfranchised baby boomers, was meaningless. And Bourdain is also dead on when he says "no one noticed." Punk was considered cute by the media for 20 minutes, and then was pushed aside so that the corporate music industry could keep spinning Yes tunes. It took years for it to percolate into the public consciousness and by then, some people would argue, it had lost its bite. I find it bizarre to turn on Vancouver's biggest rock radio station, The Fox, and hear the Ramones. This is the sort of station that never played punk in the 1970s. It, and other corporate stations, mocked punk until it could make a dollar from historically distant, and therefore safe, bands.

What about the present? Well, this gets into those hoary questions of subversion and containment. More on those later.

PB