Hello friends. I've been on a lengthy, healthy sabbatical from Tales of Hoffman, as so many of you have been kind enough to tell me. "So you just gave that up?" you say when we meet for drinks, or bump into each other on the subway, or chat via AIM. And I always say, "Still doing it, just taking it slow," when what I want to say is, "Look, pal, you write something marginally interesting about your life every damned week for over a hundred weeks and get back to me!" But I never say that. Because I'm friendly.

Anyway, on to new things.

I owe a recent discovery to my friend Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz and an argument she had with her boyfriend months ago. She had decided that liking Starbucks was a sign of being really cool, for two main reasons. Actually two and a half. The main reason was she liked their products. The coffee, the swirly caramel-y things, the chai tea, maybe even the scones (she's never commented to me on the scones, so that is just conjecture on my part.) The secondary reason liking Starbucks was cool was because Starbucks is so unilaterally dismissed among New York's elite as being middlebrow, that to declare admiration for it showed a disdain of public opinion so strong that it validated the opinion-holder as an independent thinker and, what's more, impervious to the swaying winds of the trendmakers. The half reason was because her boyfriend and I and everyone else within earshot disagreed with her and she likes to fight.

That is, I thought I disagreed with her.

I thought I disagreed with her, readers, for the same reason you think you disagree with her. Starbucks represents the apex of the Miramaxing of America, a blanket effect on our culture wherein codes of good taste are cribbed from a few magazine articles someone read in the New Yorker a few years back, or maybe it was the J. Peterman catalogue. Furthermore, it is absurd to assign any credibility to this aesthetic from a "camp" perspective because it has none of the slum-cred. Thus, to be really into it you are, I'm afraid, the worse kind of lame-o. You are a lame-o convinced you are cool. To take it one step further, if you are still into it with the full knowledge that only lame-os could possibly be into it, and you are saying "this rules" while fronting a denied revelry in an erstwhile kitsch factor, you are then a further lame-o, because only real lame-os care so much about seeming cool that they intentionally attach themselves to something lame w! ith full knowledge. Example: my love of Styx makes me lame. (Even though they rock.)

That, and, I agree, it's fucking apeshit to spend five dollars on a cup of coffee.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that, yes, they even built a Starbucks here in Astoria once the developers started noticing college grads were living here, and, yes, I did have an hour to kill tonight and, yes, I did stop in to kill said time.

They asked me what size I wanted. I said, "Middle." They said something back in Italian (I think it was Italian) and, again, I said, "Middle."

But other than this exchange, I was flabbergasted to find my experience quite nice. I sat in a cushioned wooden chair that was much more comfortable than the $1000 monster they make me use at work. And I quickly started writing down the artists that were playing on the PA.

During my stay I heard Beck, Bennie Goodman, Ricki Lee Jones, Miles Davis (twice! Once with the Coltrane lineup, once with the Shorter lineup), Belle & Sebastian, Macy Gray and something that was like a Brazilian ethereal hip-hop thing. And I'm thinking, what other public place is there where you can hear this kind of mish-mosh of music. Until Jon Pareles opens a bar, nowhere. Sure, none of it was too obscure, but compare it to everywhere else that's either playing Tom Petty or Britney Spears.

Am I a Starbucks apologist? That's for you to decide. If you can find me a better place to waste time in a comfortable seat in this town where the music doesn't horribly suck and no one's blowing cigarette smoke in my face, I'll buy you a cup of coffee.