The early days, you say. Tell me about the early days. Before the fame, money, boredom, and overexposure. Before the "murder" and all that business. We’re lounging around in overstuffed chairs; you have a martini, I have a vitamin drink. I’m hoping my vitamins will help keep me "alive". You, you love the sordid glamour of celebrities. You interview us in an attempt to humiliate your own imagination. You interview me, specifically, because you think the world is composed of glorious lies; you want the dirt. We’ve both been around the block a few times. The early days, who cares?

The smoke coils and twists around itself. The landscape is hilly and patched with snow, the city watchful and depressed. As they rub gunpowder and sulphur into the man’s beard he says, Oh salt me well, salt me well. His name is Conrad or Jacob or Hans and this is his big moment. He grew up in a small city with a river running through it; he will be burned alive in a city much like it. The smoke fills the sky and his flesh sizzles; it bubbles and blackens. You expect to hear: No! No! No!--the way people talk when they want something to stop. Instead, as soon as the ropes on his wrist are burned, he’ll raise his two forefingers, giving the promised signal to the brethren that a martyr’s death is bearable.
But that’s not the early days exactly you had in mind. You can’t dispense with historical context, however; I’ll insist on that. My guess is that Death doesn’t change, but our ideas about Death do. People didn't used to think as abstractly as they do today, that's what Ray would have said. They pictured dancing skeletons, leering skeletons, harvesting skeletons, clowning skeletons. Name your verb! These days, it’s all about process. What did Death teach you, everyone asks.
These days Death is used as a marketing tool. I'm not being judgmental or socialist, this is just a fact. Death is a brand of cigarettes, a brand of vodka. We wear images of Death on our t-shirts or as earrings and tattoos, as a way to accrue power. This isn’t a new urge, but more dematerialized than something like scalping.

Oh, how the blood ran. The blood flowed and spurted and trickled. The book is speckled with cheap red ink, as if it’s been spattered with blood. "The Bloody Theater or Martyrs Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only Upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Saviour, From the Time of Christ to the Year A.D. 1660". Most of the illustrations are dry and desexualized, compared to the iconography of the Catholics, for example, who are the primary villains in this epic saga of burnings, beheadings, and dismemberment. Here’s Thomas, or Didymus, who couldn't believe until he stuck his fingers in Jesus' wound; he needed to penetrate the bloody guts of his imaginary twin. Later, he made his way to Calamina, in the East Indies, where he put a stop to the abominable idolatry of the heathen, who worshipped there an image of the sun; if every image creates a shadow image, then he’s wandered into a web of stories whose endpoint is more resonant than mere sacrificial death. Still, he got cast into an oven. In the picture, he’s gazing into the oven as if the flames are a puzzle. The door to the oven guards a path, and he’s curious. He's buffed, and so are the savages. Everyone involved has muscular calves.
Beheading of James, the Son of Zebedee. Luke Hanged on an Olive Tree. Vitalus Buried Alive at Ravenna. Antipas Burned in a Red-hot Brazen Ox. Two Young Girls Led to Execution. They therefore cast these two young lambs into prison, where they tortured them with great severity... Hendrick Pruyt Burned in a Boat. Torture of Geleyn the Shoemaker. Thirty-seven Believers Burned at Antwerp. It goes on and on.
These are my people, this is my text. 1157 pages firmly establishing the Anabaptist martyrs (1525-1660) in the same exalted tradition as the early Christian martyrs. Excessive, relentless, stoic, insane. Who cares? The descriptions are so flat, only the titles are exciting.

My name is Conrad or Jacob or Hans. I grew up in a small city with a river running through it. My name is Jacob, but you know me as Jake. You know me as a rock star with alternative cache’, huge in such a way that unhappy teenagers will still sit and listen to my music non-stop before they go to their high schools and shoot to death their more popular peers. They want to transform the idea of high school, which is a sad, horrible idea to begin with, and think that terror is maybe not the best way to do this, but the most accessible.
We were a band. Ray, George, Bob and Jake. When I think of those years in America, I can only think: ZOMBIE.
We were trying to wake ourselves up. Ray, George, Bob and Jake. This was our technique: we played really fast and screeched. We conveyed anger despair confusion. The blinding flash of a Xerox machine. We were currently enrolled or recently failed college students, playing to other children in small smoky rooms. We sang a song of negation. We said no to everything we could list. Like the Dada artists, we were just kids having a good time. It meant more to some, however; those were the ones who killed themselves.