EULOGY

1.

I knew him first at nineteen, in a freshman dormitory at UC Santa Cruz, in the spring of a year I have otherwise forgotten; the dormitory had emptied for the break and we were among the few who had stayed. I came back to the room one afternoon to find him watching General Hospital on the common-room television, alone, eating Fritos Chili Cheese Flavored Corn Chips out of the bag with the volume on a setting somehow too quiet for the situation it called for.

Ten years on I had been to Goldsmiths, then Athens during the crisis, then Mexico City, and he had drifted to San Diego aftSer a job interview in 2018 he later described to me, on the phone before I flew out, as fine. The gallery in La Jolla offered me a residency in the spring of this year: six months in exchange for producing work that would, in the residency director's careful phrase, speak to the La Jolla collector base and the stipend would not survive an Airbnb. I texted him. Four days later he replied: sure, have spare futon.

2.

The apartment is on the third floor of a complex off Friars Road, adjacent to an Islands Fine Burgers and Fries whose exhaust vent runs up the back wall and gives the bedroom, on certain afternoons, a faint smell of cooking onion. He lives there alone and eats at Islands almst three times a week, usually takeout. The lease is in his name and the rent has gone up by 3-4% every year.

The futon I was meant to sleep on was, on the night I arrived, still in its plastic, leaning against the wall in the living room beside an unopened cardboard box from his last move. He helped me open the futon and we set it up on the floor, and the box stayed where it was for the rest of my residency. I asked him what was in it on the second week. He said he wasn't sur, and opened it to reveal a mass of Christmas lights, a licensed Ellen DeGeneres tableware set from Ross with the tag still on it, a PlayStation 3, a broken tennis racket, and the two copies he owns of Jak & Daxter Remastered, one in its case and the other loose.

The objects in the rest of the apartment have arrived along similar routes. The IKEA lamp on the bedside table is the first one he saw at the store on the day he needed a light. The Mr. Coffee on the counter came with the apartment and he has not replaced it. The promotional navy blue lanyard hanging over the back of the kitchen chair is from the 2019 La Jolla National Veterans Service Fund half marathon, which he ran in two hours and forty-six minutes and which he has not, since the lanyard was placed on the chair on the afternoon of the race, moved. The bathmat is from Target and features a Halloween pattern with Jack O'Lanterns and Skeletons.

In the morning he stands at the kitchen counter eating shredded wheat, and the light comes through the blinds in horizontal stripes. In the evenings he watches whatever is on. One night I asked him if he had a favorite show. He thought about it for some time and said, I like Wheel of Fortune, I guess, and then he said, I like the bonus round, and the conversation moved on.

The check-engine light of his car has been on for fourteen months. He took the car to a Pep Boys on Convoy Street in February, the technician told him a sensor was bad and the car was otherwise fine, and he has not had it looked at since. When I rode with him to the Ralphs Grocery Store, he turned on the radio and the radio was tuned to Amor 102.9 FM, the local Spanish language adult contemporary station, and at no point during the two months of riding with him to the Ralphs did the station change.

One night in the third week I came home late and he was at the kitchen table eating a Hot Pocket with a fork directly off the countertop. He looked up, he raised the fork in a gesture of acknowledgment, he asked if my thing had gone well. I said it had gone fine. He nodded and went back to the Hot Pocket. The exchange contained no observation of me, no tracking of how I had answered, no preparation for a follow-up question. He had asked the question and received the answer and the matter was closed.

I have been inside many rooms in many cities. I have not been inside one like this.

3.

In October I brought him to New York. My gallerist needed installation photographs and I had been looking for an excuse.

Friday a poetry reading at Café Forgot: vintage Margiela next to Chopova Lowena, Wales Bonner sneakers distressed to the right degree, two young women with decora hairstyles braided through with Visual Kei accessories, the featured poet reading autofiction poetry with themes surveying algorithmic governance and the commodification of dissent. He stood by the wall in clearance Nunn-Bush sneakers and a distressed yellow t-shirt that read EL CAJON HARVEST FESTIVAL 2017 — VOLUNTEER. A buyer for Dover Street Market spent ten minutes asking him where the shirt was from. He said it was from the El Cajon Harvest Festival. She asked what that was. He said he had volunteered at it. She nodded for a long time.

Afterwards we went to Basement, New York's answer to Berghain. I lost him in the crowd. At three in the morning I found him at the bar surrounded by a circle of the most carefully positioned people in the room including the gallery director in Prada Mohair Pants looking him up and down with the expression of a person who has located a glitch and cannot decide whether to report it. She asked him, eventually, how did you get in here. He said, the bouncer let me in. The circle broke and reformed on the other side of him. He bought another Modelo. He went home with a man and came back to our hotel the next morning.

4.

In the tenth week of the residency, I started a writing in a notebook, which I kept in the drawer of the kitchen table under a stack of takeout menus from a Vietnamese place on Convoy St. and an unfilled ballot for a 2021 city-council recall election. The pages filled. I underlined some of these and circled others. I had been trained, by years of practice and "critical theory", to know what was happening at the table. I had lectured in three countries on the operation by which observation crosses over into description and description crosses over into name

I had written essays on this operation before— on the dandy named by Baudelaire and dead by the Belle Époque, on the beatnik named by Herb Caen in 1958 and over by the time Kerouac was on television, on the hippie named into existence by the press in 1967 and finished at Altamont, on the yuppie named in 1980 and a slur by 1987, on the hipster named on the blogs of the mid aughts and a marketing category within the next three years, on the e-girl made legible by Tiktok in 2019 and on indie sleaze a few years later. None of it stopped me. I am not certain any of it had ever been intended to.

5.

It was a Tuesday at 11:47PM. He had gone to bed. The phrase that has become the title of this book arrived in the notebook with the kind of small click a deadbolt makes when the key has finally caught. By the time he woken up in the morning he was the Pac Sun Avant Garde: a category, a thing the third person could be performed on. I had reached for Baudrillard four times before I had reached for conversation with the man across the table. Bourdieu arrived to explain a trip to Home Depot. The citations were what I had instead of him. The sheet of theory I inserted between his face and my eye that night has not, in the months since, come out.

The installation opens tomorrow. Four color-field paintings with vaguely wave-like patterns, destined for medical offices and biotech lobbies in Sorrento Valley. The paintings are corpses dressed for sale. I have made them on purpose. The part of my practice that has spent its career critiquing this transaction has been, for these months, at the kitchen table doing something else.

This manuscript will be published by the end of the month. Hopefully in print in four months. Discussed on "X" (formerly twitter) and several theory meme pages in six. By the second summer the figure I have spent the chapter trying to describe will have been replaced by the picture of itself, the photograph the algorithm has retroactively chosen to stand for him. He'll never know this. He does not read the publications or use the platforms very often.

I leave Sunday. I have not told him. I will tell him Saturday and he will say sure, that makes sense, and he will help me carry the bags down past the Islands Fine Burgers and Fries to the car. We will hug at the curb. I will leave a copy of the essay in the apartment, where it will sit untouched on the table.

This is the eulogy. It is for the figure who existed before the phrase was written. The man in the kitchen is, this morning, both the The Pac Sun Avant garde and the surviving body of the man who inspired him. He is also, Somewhere in the cabinet behind the closed door above the sink, every reader who still owns one object the author never finished writing into the script. Tomorrow he will be only the body, and the Pac Sun Avant Garde will be only the phrase, and they will never be the same person again.