Being Ari Gold
On identity theft, curse videos, and the meaning of your name
Do you, like me, want to violently puke when a friend talks about their “personal brand”?
How did this happen to humans, and what do we do about it?
For most of history, a name was sacred. To the ancient Egyptians, erasing a pharaoh’s name from the temple was to kill him a second time. The Talmud says a good name is worth more than great riches. In Homer, a hero’s first act upon arrival is to announce the lineage of his name.
But in These Modern Times™, we have personal branding, the sociopathic endpoint of human culture. We manage our names the way a corporation manages its logo. Flatten complexity, amplify signal, repeat message until it sticks. But a corporation has no interior life to flatten, so how does a human compete?
Viral fame can also happen to your name before it happens to you. I know this because my name is Ari Gold. Or as people say, “Like Entourage?”
The Heading of this Section is Called “Assholes”
Before “Ari Gold” was a synonym for yelling into a Razr flip phone, I thought it was me. Filmmaker, uke player, winner of High Times Magazine’s Stoner of the Year (for playing a friendly drug dealer in the movie Groove), and son of a novelist who’d lost his first agent by refusing to change his name to Gould.
Like my dad, I was given no middle name. I was named Ari because my mom thought Paul Newman looked hot as Ari Ben Canaan in “Exodus,” and my dad had claimed Paul Newman might be his second cousin. (Probably wishful thinking.)
As a kid I had mixed feelings about my name, which sounded more Jewish than I was: I had an atheist-Episcopalian mom, and therefore wasn’t Jewish enough for Orthodox Jews, only for Hitler.
And worse, I had a speech impediment and couldn’t make a “R” sound, so I never wanted to introduce myself at all, because it came out as “Awi.” Confused kids on the playground would repeat “Awi?” and I would attempt to correct them by spelling it out: “A! Ow! I!”
But I liked that Ari meant lion, and this I think led to me living an unshaven life when I grew up.
So, unshaven and all grown up, I found myself in a ukulele-driven rock band with an up-and-coming unshaven actor named Adrian Grenier. He played drums.
After Adrian was cast as Vinnie Chase in a new HBO pilot, produced by his managers, his team came to watch our band play. At that point, the show’s power-agent character, based on super-agent Ari Emanuel, was named something like Ari Jacobs.
But sometime between the filming and the air date, someone decided the character needed a punchier last name.
They took mine. Without asking. I found out at the premiere.
How could this have happened? Adrian said he hadn’t made that decision (I believe him) but… maybe it was kind of funny? I wasn’t so amused, but I didn’t want to sue a show that was launching my friend’s success. Anyway, how famous could the agent character get, in a show about a movie star?
Very famous, it turned out. I was biking through Times Square the following year and looked up to find a billboard the size of an aircraft carrier reading:
ARI GOLD IS A DOUCHEBAG.
Maybe it was time to fight back.
Two different lawyers told me that if a little person like me tried to sue a giant media corporation, I’d lose. By not acting sooner, they told me, I had implied that I accepted the theft of my name.
Apparently the law has a frat-boy concept that stunned silence means consent.
So I endured, for years, the idiotic question - Haha dude are you named after Entourage?
Or when I reached out for work in the film world, people would hang up after barking: Shut up, that’s not your name.
Other people got rich and famous off a TV show that I had nothing to do with, but had to talk about. Every. Single. Day.
Creative Voodoo Revenge
When the show finally went off the air, I breathed a sigh of relief, until a movie was announced, and I realized I had to take fast action.
Since I wasn’t suing, at least now, I would do an artistic curse ritual: I’d release my own terrible music video called “Entourage - A Film By Ari Gold.”
So my brother Ethan composed a song about bro-entourage-douchebags for me, and Louis Arogant sang it. For the mini-movie, we filmed a shot-for-shot parody of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” using the same sun-drenched locations where I’d shot my movie Adventures of Power with Adrian.
I cast a male model and a puppet in place of the female models of the Avicii video. Then I called in reinforcements: the other Ari Golds. The real-life dance-pop artist Sir Ari Gold contributed backing vocals. An organic chef named Ari Gold sent good vibes from Portland. We formed an AriGoldian front against the corporate machine.
Our absurd little video did not go viral, but the big movie tanked. I’m not saying the curse worked…. I’m just noting the timeline.
We Must Counterstrike With Rhythm Against An Algorithmic Hellscape
I’m now thinking we (artists and other humans) have to stop trying to be a product and start being an experience.
For my movie Brother Verses Brother we’re working to build a vibe that includes my name, but an experience more than anything. Radical honesty. Songs and stories. Secret screenings. Whispers and invitations. FOMO and intimacy. We invite people into dark rooms and let a movie sing with them.
The old Ari Gold was screaming into a gold-plated phone, the new one is gathering other humans who want art to humanize us.
Fame is a volatile liquid. It comes and it goes. The billboard came down. Now I introduce myself and my name is sort of mine again - but it’s the other Ari Golds’ too.
For now, I’ll forgo a Times Square billboard that forgets, and take a movie or a poem for humans who remember.
You’re invited. Call yourself whatever you like.
PS: please comment here instead of replying - that way your name is out there too—>