Review: Mission Creek 2025 kicks off with the glorious Kim Gordon, Rachel Kushner and LA LOM

Opening night of Mission Creek! At Hancher! 

My last Mission Creek was 2019, officially the Before Times of Iowa City public culture. Venues have closed, or been torn down.

Hancher was buzzing with people with their lanyards and wristbands, anticipating a deep dive into live music and culture. There is a Mission Creek feeling, shared in knowing glances between festival veterans. I hesitate to compare it to Burning Man, but Creekers share with Burners a feeling that unless you’ve been there, you don’t know.

Mission Creek’s hallmarks have always been experimentation, eclecticism, inclusivity and optimism. Thursday night at Hancher is an exemplar of this ethos: A novelist reading from her latest novel and engaging in conversation with the headliner Kim Gordon. LA LOM (the Los Angeles League of Musicians) playing pan-Latin dance music and Gordon playing with her band.

Rachel Kushner and Kim Gordon

Rachel Kushner read excerpts from her latest novel, Creation Lake. That book is narrated by a disgraced spy turned mercenary and a charismatic radical who retreated to living in a cave. The most memorable passage she read was the spy, Sadie Smith, describing her appreciation of the regional wine she imbibes in roadside gas stations. Said narrator is immediately unlikable, and her value-free appreciation of fine wine, roadside banality and tipsy driving is both funny and deliciously horrifying.

I thought going in that Kushner was going to interview Gordon, but the opposite was true. Kushner spoke in remarkably complete paragraphs about her work, returning repeatedly to the influence of French author Jean-Patrick Manchette, “I think he taught me that you can have a narrator who is manipulative and cruel and puts plans in people’s heads and guns in their hands.” She mentions her husband’s critique of Sadie Smith: “I find her basically intolerable, but I’d like to spend a weekend with her.”

LA LOM

The next performers, LA LOM (Los Angeles League Of Musicians) were a completely different thing.  The guitar, bass and drums trio are instrumental, with occasional shouts as the only vocal contribution to their tunes. Zac Sokolow’s guitar is the center of attention, in the tradition of Dick Dale and the Ventures. They played some originals and classic Latin American dance songs in a variety of Latin American styles, like Boleros and Cumbia.

LA LOM are willing ambassadors for Latin-American culture. They are resolutely American and Angelenos, and I hear echoes of L.A. bands like X, the Blasters and Los Lobos. Stripping down music to drums, bass and guitar is a punk impulse, and honors that side of their roots.

They’re also consummate showmen, with bassist Jake Faulkner acting as guitarist Zac Sokolow’s hype man as he held down the low end. Drummer Nicholas Baker’s drumming is the heart of the musical styles, making monster grooves out of the 3-on-4 polyrhythms and cumbia’s trademark hesitating beat. Where punk rock is straight ahead bam bam bam, Baker brings out the rhythmic richness of Latin dance music.

Kim Gordon

Kim Gordon, like Iggy Pop and Keith Richards, has been an influential figure in punk and rock music since the late 1970s. Most famously she played in Sonic Youth with her ex-husband Thurston Moore, with whom she famously split up. It’s safe to say that Gordon got most of the United States in the divorce, and after trading memoirs with Moore, she’s resolutely moved forward with her own projects, working in no one’s shadow.

Her current performance incarnation builds on the loud, cacophonous damage-distressed sound of Sonic Youth. But where that band just gave her occasional cameos, her deadpan sprechgesang spoken word delivery is now front and center.  At 71, she is unapologetic about her age, and her onstage persona and attire played intriguingly with the idea of a woman fronting a band. Wearing Lady Gaga short-shorts over sparkly hose, she struts more carefully than she did 40 years ago, but now with casual, confident command of the stage.

Her “Gulf Of Mexico” T-shirt was the most direct comment on contemporary politics, but if you’re looking for resistance to the dominant paradigm, that’s the least of what she had to offer. She toys with gender ideas, alternately owning the stage like a rock star and giving girlish shoulder shakes. She has a “don’t care, fuck off” vibe, a fearlessness that’s empowering to anyone willing to listen.

Gordon knew perfectly how to pick her band to present the music of her latest album, The Collective. Bassist Camilla Charlesworth, drummer Madi Vogt and guitarist Sarah Register are a tight group (augmented with pre-recorded backing tracks) generating a powerful, visceral roar behind Gordon’s deadpan declamations.  They played slowed-down, sludgy boom-bap punk rock that frequently threatened to dissolve into chaotic noise. It was a little like Suicide’s Alan Vega fronting the Melvins.

Kim Gordon seems to embody a whole web of contradiction. The daughter of an affluent California family, she became a central figure in the gritty chaotic downtown New York City scene of the 1970s and ’80s. In her conversation with Rachel Kushner, Gordon talked about what the painter Laura Owens wrote as a teenager about becoming an artist: “Contradict yourself constantly.” Gordon has lived that life fully: Rock star, mother, poet, feminist, affluent jet-setter, downtown fashion maven. But above all, she is tough, and takes no shit. In addition to embracing self-contradiction, she follows Emily Dickinson’s edict to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

In an age of fascists who lie with a straight face, Gordon’s steady gaze strips away the lies. For the audience at Hancher, capping off the first night of Mission Creek, she was a clear, if not simple, source of hope. Sometimes it takes the deafening screaming of guitars to wash the lies out of your ears.