Welcome to "The Cool Stuff" with Paul Tatara

I have a lot going on inside my head, although most of the time I don’t really realize it. The same goes for you. Sure, we’re both capable of lucid thoughts on occasion. We can size up a question, ponder it, turn it around in the sun a few times, and try to draw an informed conclusion. You know—we’re able to select a few entrées from the ol’ menu.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the shifting shadows of vague recall that give us our personal form of self-awareness, that fleeting series of images, sounds, past experiences, and concepts that makes us think we are who we think we are…if you know what I mean. They’re always bouncing around inside our noggins, even when we’re not trying to pin them down butterfly-style and look directly at them. 

Philosophers have long referred to this inescapable “you-ness” (or, in my case, my “me-ness”) as “consciousness,” even though not a damn one of those philosophers has ever come up with a solid, fully-accepted definition of the term. They’ve tried really hard, though, and some of them have gone a little bit wacky in the process.

Hell, Nietzsche supposedly had a complete nervous breakdown when somebody slapped a horse! Even if the horse didn’t have it coming (nobody knows for sure at this point), that seems just a tad bit histrionic. The fact is—if there really are any facts— that after several hundred years of smart guys pondering the situation, not being able to explain consciousness seems to be the single most pivotal aspect of consciousness.

If Nietzsche had only allowed himself to admit this, he could have just punched the guy who slapped the horse, had a nice lunch, and gotten on with his furrowed-brow life. 

Well, I’m no philosopher, thank God—if there is a God—but for the moment, I’ll be playing one right here in front of your eyeballs as I introduce you to “The Cool Stuff” with Paul Tatara.

I’m Paul Tatara, a happy husband and father of two, a former film critic for CNN.com, a former contributor to TCM.com, a screenwriter who had a couple of screenplays in Development Hell out in Hollywood (calm down— it’s really just Los Angeles) years ago, and who now wants to talk to you about a few things.

In case you’re wondering, and I desperately hope you are, that image at the top of this post is what I call my “Consciousness Box.” It rests on my writing desk, and every now and then I dig through it just to see who I think I’m supposed to be, outside of a name that I have on an official document somewhere in a box in my closet. I don’t remember exactly how I got the idea, but several years ago, I decided to get pinback buttons made of all those little bouncing-around-in-my-head thingies that I just mentioned.

I had to focus really, really hard to determine what they are, too, just like Nietzsche did, but instead of eventually “crying over slapped horse,” I ended up with a bunch of cool little tchotchkes (Yiddish word that I did not learn while growing up in semi-rural Alabama) that I can show to my friends and pin on the strap of the tote bag that I’ve had slung over my shoulder for the past 35 or so years as I prowl the Mean Streets of New York City.

There’s a lot going on in my Consciousness Box, and it’s all cool. It is, in fact, the Cool Stuff that I will be covering for you here at “The Cool Stuff” with Paul Tatara.

The Box is teeming with multiple modes of grooviness that a 61-year-old man-child, and even men-children and women-children of lesser ages, can enjoy quite readily. There’s tons of stuff in there- buttons depicting the Beatles, Springsteen, and Dylan (my Holy Trinity, since the Catholicism never really took hold), Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese, Hostess Cupcakes, Mary Tyler Moore, Batman (Adam West variety), Superman (Max Fleischer variety), Archie comics, Bazooka bubblegum, Bob Hope, Bob Marley, Fritz Lang, the Carnegie Deli, Serge Gainsbourg, Randy Newman, Charlie Brown, Catch-22, K-Tel Records, Dick Tracy, Alfred Hitchcock, Don Martin, Leonard Cohen, Franco Harris, Charlie Parker, Father Guido Sarducci, The Band, The Banana Splits, Joni Mitchell, Sunbeam bread, Hank Aaron, Julianne Moore, Leroy Kelly, Haile Selassie (Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Elect of God), Jason Robards, Joe Strummer, Shelly Manne, Johnny Stompanato, Richard Thompson, Apocalypse Now, Being There, Taxi Driver, Alien, Rocky (but only the first one!), Charms Blow Pops, and the ridiculously huge cream puffs they serve at Schmidt’s Sausage Haus in Columbus, Ohio, to name just a few. Oh— and Randy Newman.

Wait. I already said Randy Newman.

When I decide to do something that I think is interesting or fun, I can’t help but do it to excess, because, try as I might, I can’t shake the suspicious feeling that I am one day going to die. So there are damn near seven hundred buttons in the box at this point.

Now, I’m assuming you don’t have a Consciousness Box of your own. I mean, if you did, that would be a pretty wild coincidence. It would actually double as a Coincidence Box in that case. But if you did have one, I imagine quite a bit of what I have in my box would be in your box, too. That’s why it’s called popular culture. But I’m absolutely certain I’ve got things in there that you’ve never heard of or didn’t consider for more than a couple of seconds upon having heard of it, and you missed out. 

Not all of the posts will be funny, even when I’m trying to be funny, and not all of them will be heavy, although you can’t exactly write about Raging Bull or The Times of Harvey Milk without throwing a little weight on it. There will be balance here— the Yin and the Yang, if you will (even more philosophy, but easier to handle than the tormented German kind).

What I hope, though, is that I can get you looking a little more closely at the elements of consciousness, as defined by me, that we share. And maybe I’ll even be able to hip you to some things that you’ll want to investigate further and weave into your own worldview.

My goal, then, is to meld my real Box with your theoretical Box. Maybe we’ll both grow a little in the process, and the ripple effect will generate…well. Probably a social collapse of some sort because that’s pretty much all that seems to be going on these days. But at least we will have tried.

Here in the early going, “The Cool Stuff” will be totally free of charge, but if enough people show interest, I’ll start offering subscription-only posts for the minimal fee of $5 a month. You blow more than that on potato chips every month, and my writing will do absolutely nothing to raise your cholesterol level.

I truly hope you’ll help me with this. If you like what you see here, please tell your friends to check it out. “Community” has gotten to be a touchy concept in America, since, as I’ve already alluded, many communities now want to strangle other communities until they turn purple and fall to the ground. And quite often for good reason. But the “Cool Stuff” community I’m hoping to build will be having nothing but a good time while possibly thinking a teeny-weeny bit, too.

I’m new to Substack, and I am not the technical type, as you may have imagined based on my enthusiastic blathering about Blow Pops and giant cream puffs. So I may make a posting error here and there until I get the hang of everything. But I genuinely want to welcome you and your brain, and I hope we can come to a shared understanding that there never really has been a better rock band than the Beatles, not even close, and that Apocalypse Now is stitched together via staggeringly brilliant sequences while not being a particularly cohesive or profound motion picture. If we can't do that, keep reading. We’re bound to agree on something sooner or later.