Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

He broke up the Fakes. He broke up the Demonics. He stopped going out. I didn’t see him for months. I was still living at home — I had just had Ada, and Mom was helping me. Nik had moved into his own apartment over the garage in Topanga Canyon. I didn’t hear from him. I called a couple of times and spoke with him. I just thought he was depressed. He was going through that stage when you realize your youthful dreams are not panning out. I was going through my own version of that, reconciling myself to my new responsibilities. That was all normal. And, yeah, I thought Nik would get over it.

Then one day I get a call. Nik wants me to come over to hear his new record. Which is news to me, that he has one. But he had been recording this solo record. He did it all by himself with his four-track. It is a great record, introspective and with these very simple, understated, overdubbed harmonies. When I sat in his apartment and heard it, I was so moved. Then he said, “Do you want to read the reviews?”

I said, “Uh, yeah, sure.” He pulled out the Chronicles. The precursor to the Chronicles had begun years before. It was simply a scrapbook of Nik’s real life. His music life, which was his whole life. He pasted in flyers from gigs, photos, capsule mentions in the paper, that sort of thing. He put in pages announcing the records and detailed the track listings. He had been making his own records for years. But this was the first time Nik put a fake review in his Chronicles.

LA WEEKLY, August 1, 1981

Nik Worth Goes Solo

by Stiv Stereo

Nik Worth’s brilliant post-punk band, the Fakes, made a huge splash this year with their debut album, Here Come Your Fakes. Nik Worth, their laconic lead singer, has come out with a self-produced solo album on the heels of that success, entitled Meet Me at the Movies. This album, made entirely by Worth in his home studio, is a completely different affair. Where the power pop effervescence of a single like “Gold Girls” on Here Come Your Fakes made it irresistible on the dance floor, Worth is after a darker, more experimental effect in this solo effort. He initiates acoustic fragments of songs, minor and even elegiac, and then segues into other, more complex songs like “Take Me Back” and “Sweep Song.” Toward the end of the record there is even a music-only reprise of the lovely “Sweep Song” titled “Singalong Sweep Song.” The sort-of song cycle seems to waiver from quiet to intense, and then builds to what can only be described as an old-fashioned power ballad, “(I’ll Wait) All of My Life.” This song is an instant classic, the kind of song no one writes anymore. It features a slow build, a quiet intro on the in verse, and then a commanding rising riff, and at last a restrained but undeniable guitar solo, bringing the power home. Will the Fakes fans dig this throwback to the slower days of pop? With a great cover shot of a decidedly brooding Worth and a lyric sheet that steers well clear of the sentimental, I think they will. A–

I did not yet realize how elaborate this new phase would get. He recorded more music, and then he wrote in the Chronicles about the music. Sometimes they were good reviews. Sometimes they were pans. From this point on, his real life and his life as recorded in the Chronicles diverged.

After filming, I spent the afternoon at my mother’s. It was blessedly uneventful. As I was leaving, she told me that Nik had been to see her. Funny he went to see her without mentioning it to me.

I got into my car. I couldn’t wait to get home, get in my bathrobe, eat my dinner, watch something stupid on TV. It was good that he was stepping up without my arranging it. Usually I would have to push him to see her. He avoided it except on birthdays and holidays. He would say it was difficult for him to see her “like this.” Especially, somehow, for him. I know how he justified it: he thought his seeing Mom like this cost him more than it cost me. “You are better at taking care of people than I am, let’s face it,” he said. As if it were some kind of compliment. I muttered as I drove. Yeah, he is so fucking sensitive, and I am so strong. Nothing is difficult for me, right? The really irritating part, of course, was that my mother adored Nik. She wouldn’t complain about his not visiting, because even in her diminished state she was protecting him. She loved me, truly, and let me look after her, but she adored Nik, and still looked out for him. I glanced in the rearview and caught a glimpse of something most unbecoming. I bared my teeth at myself and actually said, “Grrrr.” It didn’t make how I felt any more becoming. But it melted my self-pity into self-loathing, which was better somehow.

I got home exhausted and starving. I made a salad. I tore off a heel of bread and balanced it on the edge of the plate. I poured a glass of wine. It was dark and quiet. I clicked on the television to see what was happening in the real world.

All they showed was the one photo. The man standing on the box. That picture was it. It had the weird KKK silhouette of the pointy hat and the cloak. It had the imitation-of-Christ pose. Then you noticed the wires coming from the hands, the bare feet. I watched in a daze while vaguely hearing what the people were saying — they said the word shocking, they struggled to find a tone that worked. This time it was easy to ignore the stream of news that ran across the bottom of the screen. I ended up at my computer, at a magazine’s website. Eleven images had been posted.

At first, all I could see were the bodies against the cement and the plastic. Then the people in the bright blue rubber gloves and the khaki uniforms. I felt an animal fear, a queasy medical-experiment fear as familiar objects became dislocated and warped.

I looked at these naked bodies. With the plastic hoods, they all looked alike: ordinary human bodies, fragile at the knees and ankles and wrists. Their dusty bare feet struggled to hold their poses. The skin was pale under the Powershot — or maybe the Sureshot — flash. Their genitals were pixelated out by the magazine’s editors. But the faces of the soldiers were clearly visible. They looked young. They looked casual and slightly bored. The corridors and cells were cement painted a high-gloss industrial beige or yellow. The flash bounced off the walls and made them glisten. The floor looked wet from seeped-in moisture. The naked men lay or were laid on it. What was I supposed to do with these images?

I kept looking. But although I felt the raw indecency of it, although I could feel my heart pounding and my mouth get dry — actual autonomic nerve reactions to panic, an effect felt at a basal level, related somehow to my self-protection — my reaction was merely that: revulsion. Otherwise my engagement was intellectual, not emotional. It hit my stomach and my head. I couldn’t make emotional sense out of it.

I kept on looking.

Something held me. It wasn’t the victims, the masked heap of naked men. I already knew about that. It was the young soldiers. I could see — I quickly came to understand — that the soldiers had posed and arranged these photos. They were not surreptitious shots but a little show created by them. One soldier in particular kept turning up, a tiny young woman who smiled as she posed for the camera. Her cheer among the faceless bodies broke through the noise, all right. The experience of seeing these photographs was overwhelming, but I could begin to locate it, feel it, in this girl’s face.

For the past week, I had watched the news whenever I was home. I hardly thought about my own life at all. The story did not disappear — it seemed to gather momentum, it seemed to be getting worse. I followed the coverage closely, what the major-general said, what the secretary of defense said. The president spoke about the “shameful and appalling acts.” I simultaneously searched around the web to the rest of the world. I went to sites based in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, sites with Arabic writing I couldn’t read but lots of photos I could see. These photographs were everywhere.