Queens of the Stone Age – "In My Head" (2005)

Keep on playin' our favorite song

Turn it up!

The subject of the previous 2 or 3 lines was the fictional Hollywood talent agent, Ari Gold, who is my favorite character on the late, great HBO series, Entourage.  

Here's Ari's reaction when he learns that one of his clients had been dating his assistant, but now has broken up with her:

Ari: From now on, ask my permission before you bang my assistant. . . . I could have told you it would end badly.  Now I've gotta fire her so you don't feel weird when you come to my office.

Client: No! Don't fire her!

Ari: All right.  I'll just sexually harass her until she quits.

That exchange may have been a case of art imitating life.

Ari Gold  in action

The fictional Ari Gold was inspired by the very real Hollywood super agent Ari Emanuel, who left a large Hollywood agency in 1995 to open up his own shop, which he named Endeavor.  

Here's an excerpt from a New York Times article about Emanuel and Endeavor:

In depositions and court filings . . . Ms. Epstein and other Endeavor employees described office escapades that included rampant pot-smoking, obscene hazing at corporate retreats, sexual frolics on desks, and one agent demanding that his assistants book prostitutes for him.

Mr. Emanuel, the filings said, allowed a friend to operate a pornographic Web site out of the agency’s quarters. Also, according to Ms. Epstein’s filings, Mr. Emanuel made antigay and racist remarks — accusations he disputed at the time.

Ari Emanuel and Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven)

Ms. Epstein said Mr. Emanuel blocked her from sending a script about the Navy SEALs to the actor Wesley Snipes.  “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” the agent was reported in the papers to have said. “Everyone knows that blacks don’t swim.”

Ari Emanuel is the younger brother of Rahm Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff who is currently the mayor of Chicago.  Rahm Emanuel – whose nickname is "Rahmbo" – is also a "colorful" (i.e., nasty, profane, and obnoxious) character.

Here's an excerpt from a New York Times story about the Emanuel brothers:

The best Rahm Emanuel story . . . takes place in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

Rahm Emanuel

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout.  Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies – Democrats, Republicans, members of the press – who wronged them during the 1992 campaign.  Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list.  So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush.  Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and . . . shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table. 

''Dead!'' he screamed.

The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ''Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!''

"In My Head" was released in 2005 on the Queens of the Stone Age's fourth studio album, Lullabies to Paralyze.  It was featured in the closing credit sequence of the eighth episode of the third season of Entourage, which was titled "Release."

QOTSA guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen was not happy with the music video for "In My Head":

The video we ended up with for that song is so lame! . . . It was like a f*cking Gap commercial.  It was terrible.  Just terrible.  

Here's that video:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Queens of the Stone Age – "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret" (2000)

We've got something to reveal

No one can know how we feel 

I have no problem letting everyone know exactly how I feel about Entourage, the brilliant comedy series that ran on HBO from 2004 to 2011.

Entourage is a man's show (like Sex in the City was a woman's show).  Some of you women will disagree and take the position that Entourage isn't a man's show – it's a boy's show.  

Exactly!  That's why it's so great!

I love everything about Entourage!  I love it so much I want to marry it and have all its babies!

The thing I love the very most about Entourage is Jeremy Piven's character, a fictional Hollywood talent agent named Ari Gold.

Ari Gold: Veni, Vidi, Vici!

Ari Gold is greedy, profane, narcissistic, sexist and homophobic, and a compulsive liar.  (Surprisingly, he is faithful to his wife – but probably only because his wife inherited a lot of money from her father.)

Ari has a way with words.  Here's a conversation between Ari and a movie producer who is driving a hard bargain in negotiations involving one of Ari's clients:

Ari: Joe, what are you doing to me?

Joe: I'm not doing anything, Ari, I'm just doing good business.

Ari: That's weird because it feels like you are taking a steel catheter and shoving it right up my c*ck.

Ari spends a lot of time on the phone

You can count on Ari to drop the f-bomb in just about every scene he appears in.  Here's Ari during a negotiation session with his former boss:

Former boss: I'm prepared to offer you four million dollars.

Ari: OK . . . well, let me counter with F*CK YOU!

Here's a phone conversation between Ari and a client he's been calling repeatedly:

Client: Can't you wait for me to call you back?

Ari: As the French might say, NO I F*CKING CAN NOT!

Ari applies his own brand of logic to the problems that pop up in his life.  For example, here's what Ari says when he's trying to get an old college girlfriend who is now an assistant to the head of a big movie studio to get him a meeting with her boss:

Ari: I used to f*ck you.  You owe me!

The boys of Entourage

Ari regularly abuses his gay assistant, Lloyd.  Here's what he says to Lloyd one morning when Lloyd's posture strikes Ari as a little off:

Ari: Why are you sitting like that?  Are you wearing a butt plug?

And here's what Ari says after telling Lloyd to ignore the phones for a moment and just listen to what Ari is saying:

Ari: F*ck the phones, Lloyd.  Unless Carmen Electra calls for an emergency t*ttie f*ck, don't answer!

Jeremy Piven contemplates
one of his Emmys

Here's Ari's reaction when he learns that one of his clients was dating his assistant, but now has broken up with her:

Ari: From now on, ask my permission before you bang my assistant. . . . I could have told you it would end badly.  Now I've gotta fire her so you don't feel weird when you come to my office.

Client: No! Don't fire her!

Ari: All right.  I'll just sexually harass her until she quits.

Is this last exchange a case of art imitating life?

The fictional Ari Gold was inspired by the very real Hollywood super agent Ari Emanuel, who left a large Hollywood agency in 1995 to open up his own shop, which he named Endeavor.

Several years later, a former Endeavor agent named Sandra Epstein sued the agency, alleging (among other things) sexual harassment.

We'll learn more about Ari Emanuel and his famous brother, Rahm – the mayor of Chicago – in the next 2 or 3 lines.

Queens of the Stone Age

The Queens of the Stone Age formed in Palm Desert, California in 1996.  "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret" is the first single from their second studio album, Rated R, which was released in 2000.

The "Rated R" album cover

"The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret" is featured in "I Love You Too," the ninth episode of the second season of Entourage.  The song plays as porn stars Jesse Jane, Devon, and Teagen Presley walk through a hotel corridor on their way to visit a bitter movie reviewer played by Rainn Wilson (who is best known for his role of Dwight Schrute on the NBC series, The Office).

Here's "The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret."  (Warning: the music video for the song is repulsive – you might want to avert your gaze and simply listen to the song, which is fabulous.)

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Chester French – "She Loves Everybody" (2009)

Well she craves affection

So I use protection

That's always a good idea, of course.  But it's an especially good idea given the title of today's featured song.

"She Loves Everybody" plays during the closing credits of the first episode of the fourth season of the HBO comedy, Entourage.

I've currently watching Entourage on DVD.  (Thank you, public library!)

The show, which ran for eight seasons, depicts the career of a young, up-and-coming movie star who grew up on the mean streets of Queens.

The boys of Entourage

The actor's entourage consists of an older half-brother (a lesser TV and movie actor) and two childhood friends – one is his driver and all-around gofer while the other one becomes his manager.

Entourage was inspired by the career of movie star Mark Wahlberg, who grew up in a tough part of Boston.  Wahlberg was a bad, bad boy who was arrested many times while still a teenager.  (We're not talking jaywalking or littering, boys and girls – once he was charged with attempted murder.)  

Wahlberg eventually cleaned up his act.  After fronting a hip-hop band (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch) and gaining fame as a Calvin Klein underwear model, he made his movie debut at age 22 and today is a successful leading man.

Mark Wahlberg in The Departed

Vincent Chase, the fictional star of Entourage, is Wahlberg without the rap sheet.  He and his buddies live the good life in L.A. – their life abounds with sex, drugs, and sex 'n' drugs.

There's not quite as much nudity as you might expect from an HBO show, but that's really my only complaint about Entourage.

Click here for a list of the 100 hottest women to appear on Entourage.

I'd call Entourage a guilty pleasure except that I don't feel the least bit guilty about watching it.

"She Loves Everybody" is a pretty good, but the backstory of the two-man band that recorded it is why I'm featuring it today.  

Chester French consists of D. A. Wallach and Maxwell Drummey, two friends who met as Harvard College freshmen in 2003.  

The group is named after sculptor Daniel Chester French, who is best-known for the iconic 19-foot-tall statue of Abraham Lincoln that is the centerpiece of the Lincoln Memorial:

French's other works include the famous statue of a Minuteman in Concord, Massachusetts, and the seated statue of the founder of Harvard College, John Harvard, which stands in Harvard Yard:

By the way, the French statue of John Harvard is known as "the statue of three lies."

First, the statue isn't a likeness of Harvard – no one knows what John Harvard looked like, so the sculptor used a friend as the model for the statue.

Daniel Chester French

Second, John Harvard was not Harvard's founder, although he was the college's first major benefactor, leaving half of his estate and his library of some 400 volumes to Harvard.

Third, Harvard was founded in 1636 – not 1638, as the engraving on the statue says.

Wallach and Drummey learned how to record and produce music at Harvard's recording studio, and put together a demo album their senior year.  That demo ended up in the hands of Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, among others, and became the subject of a full-scale bidding war that was eventually won by Interscope Records (whose other artists include Eminem, Lady Gaga, and the Black Eyed Peas.)

Maxwell Drummey and D. A. Wallach:
a/k/a "Twee and Tweer"

Vocalist/songwriter Wallach has a very interesting biography.  It's so interesting that you have to wonder if it's really true.

Wallach was a two-time finalist in the Federal Reserve Bank's "Fed Challenge," a monetary policy competition for high-school students.

Here's the Wikipedia description of the "Fed Challenge":

The Fed Challenge begins with regional and district rounds of competition.  Each Fed Challenge team, consisting of three to five students, presents an analysis of the current state of the economy backed by current economic data and a monetary policy recommendation for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC).  Following the presentation, judges question each team about their presentation and their knowledge of macroeconomic theory.  Federal Reserve Bank economists and officers judge the district competitions.

(I did a lot of really nerdy stuff in high school, but I never did anything that was nearly that nerdy.)

At Harvard, Wallach won a prize as the outstanding African-American Studies major.  (He is white.)  He also studied the Gikuyu language, which is spoken primarily by Bantu tribesmen in Kenya.

Today, Wallach is not only a member of Chester French but also a solo recording artist.  He is the official artist-in-residence at Spotify and an investor in a number of technology companies (including a digital currency network and a telemedicine provider).

"She Loves Everybody" was the first single from Chester French's 2009 debut album, Love the Future.  The packaging for the single resembled a condom wrapper:

The "She Loves Everybody" video features a hot girl beating the crap out of Wallach and Drummey.

It goes without saying that a video that featured a guy doing one-tenth as much violence to a girl would likely result in the party responsible for it being drawn and quartered.  But I don't recall hearing any protests over this video's depiction a woman whaling away on a couple of males:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: