Shoegazer love-a-gore-gore: My Bloody Valentine at ATP NY. All photos by Jessica Reeves.
By Todd Lavoie
“Nobody puts Baby in a corner!”
Walking around Kutsher’s Hotel in Monticello, NY, knee-deep and beyond in Catskills swank-gone-asunder, oohing and aahing and occasionally cackling in shuddered horror upon stumbling across yet another shining example of ’50s-era Borscht Belt décor in steady decline, I couldn’t help but evoke that priceless line from what is possibly the cringiest of ’80s cringefest flicks, Dirty Dancing, as I kicked off day three, Sept. 21, of All Tomorrow’s Parties NY.
As it turns out, Kutsher’s – the epicenter for all things indie for that weekend – was also apparently the inspiration for the set of Dirty Dancing. Wikipedia away – you’ll see. Everything began to make sense. Here we were, on our third day of the festival, and the talk of the town wasn’t Saturday night’s Les Savy Fav and Shellac double-whammy, or the astounding seven-places-at-once ubiquity of Kevin Shields, who seemed to pop up from every corner – someone has to be in the corner, obviously, since Baby can’t – but instead it was the irrefutable suspicion that this place held a singular role in so-bad-it’s-good moviemaking history. We indie kids love our irony, after all – and we’d all been thrust upon the motherlode.