The following is based on notes written last Friday afternoon at the new “15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, Inspired by Starbucks”:

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The first thing to know about this place is that Starbucks isn’t pretending not to own it. Besides the “Inspired by” subtitle, it sells Starbucks’ Tazo Tea and Via instant coffee packets.

The second thing is there are many precedents for corporations setting up faux-indie divisions. I’m old enough to remember Gallo Wines’ many pseudonymous brands of the ’70s and ’80s. Media giants have long hidden themselves behind pseudo-independent brands (Focus Features, Caroline Records). And of course there’s “Shoebox Greetings, A Tiny Little Division of Hallmark.”

But a more apt comparison would be to Britain’s local pubs. Thousands of them are owned by national or regional chains; some of those chains are owned by big breweries.

Many of these corporate-owned boozers maintain individualistic names and decor. That’s what Starbucks boss Howard Schultz seemed to have in mind when he recently said he wanted to add locally-themed coffeehouses to the firm’s regular, standardized outlets.

The company seems to have spent a LOT to make a former regular Starbucks branch site, in a recently-built building, look oh-so raw and rustic.
One could say it looks like a studio backdrop for a 1992 “designer grunge” fashion spread. Like a Las Vegas resort with a “Seattle” theme. Like a big stage set for La Boheme.

It definitely looks like it’s trying too hard to imitate other eateries and drinkeries in the neighborhood (Victrola, 22 Doors, Smith, Redwood, Linda’s, Oddfellows, Buck, etc.).

The place sounds differently, too. Instead of the Starbucks-curated CDs that play in the chain’s regular stores, 15th Avenue features an oh-so carefully “eclectic” music mix. Neko Case, Belle and Sebastian, dance remixes of West Coast jazz standards.

15th Avenue’s products and service routines are truly different from the Starbucks norm. Are they better? That’s a matter of personal taste, but I prefer this to the chain standard. Every drink is made from freshly ground beans, in your choice of varietal roasts and blends, on a La Marzocco espresso machine (not the more automated devices found in regular Starbucks stores).

“For here” orders are served on real dishes, without logos for now. (A hand-lettered sign promises, “Our logo serveware is coming soon.”)

Unlike regular Starbucks branches, 15th Avenue serves wine and bottled beer for on-premises consumption, including several Redhook flavors. (Both Redhook and Starbucks were originally cofounded by local serial entrepreneur Gordon Bowker.)

One thing 15th Avenue has in common with a regular Starbucks is the lack of free WiFi (though you can leech a wireless connection from the Smith bar next door).

Even if 15th Avenue Coffee doesn’t earn its keep as a coffeehouse, it could survive as a lab for the mother chain, testing new products and shticks.

It could blossom into its own subsidiary chain, perhaps with each unit named for its own street. (Note the name for 15th Avenue’s Web site, “streetlevelcoffee.com.”)

It could flop and be replaced by another Starbucks-”inspired” concept.

What it won’t become is a real threat to the indie coffeehouses and their devout clientele.

Indie coffeehouses, with their lingering beat/hippie historical vibe, are natural gathering places for “creative class” people, who frequently style themselves as non-corporate or even anti-corporate.

To these customers, chain-owned coffeehouses—no matter how idiosyncratic looking—will never be good enough.

…has even made the pages of the Harvard Business Review. Their writer’s take: It’ll never make it.

To mix sports metaphors, the city punted. Nickels took a dive. They settled for a settlement. They whored out to Clay Bennett. They took sheckels of gold (and the vaguest of non-promises by the NBA for a new team in some future decade) instead of continuing the fight to keep the Sonics here.

The separate Howard Schultz lawsuit continues, and is our only remaining chance to keep this team, OUR team, our first big-league team.

This feels worse than the 1978 finals loss, the 1996 finals loss, and the trading of Ray Allen combined.

…your Starbuckless evening. Now on to a new day!:

• Did you know Seattle’s got a waterfront maritime museum? Well, you better see it now, while you still can.
• Seattle U to students: We wanna become the undisputed top private college in the region. To do that, your tuition’s going up.
• A local politician is heeding the siren call for capital-C Change. It’s Republican Dino Rossi.
• Real headline: “Seattle home prices up a tad in Q4, says report.” I’ve been around the Seattle music scene too long to think of “a Tad” as something small.
• Jus’ for fun, let’s take a look at who’d like to buy the Seattle City Council.
• Urban townhomes: Could they possibly look any less dorky?
• Did a honeymooning hubby really invite two strippers to his and his bride’s hotel room, or was it all, as hubby now claims, an unsolicited break-in?
• The European Union’s fined Microsoft $1.3 billion. To put it into perspective, that’s enough to pay Bill Gates’s household expenses for almost a day.

…I’m skipping the morning-headlines thang on days when there’s not much interesting to pass on. Today, we’ve got a few items:

• Certain Pokemon valentine cards were recalled, after some of the heart-shaped lollipops attached to them contained metal fragments. Looks like Team Rocket has finally won a battle.
• Could the world’s oceans soon become beyond saving?
• Real headline: “State patrol to drivers: 911 not a traffic hotline.”
• Evergreeners: Not all as passive as the old stereotype.
• The state’s new plan for replacing those four obsolete ferries? Replace them with three new, smaller boats.
• Your help is needed in a one-time census of Puget Sound octopi.
• Sleazy corporate lawyers want access to a car-crash victim’s old MySpace page.
• A Starbucks barista plans to donate a kidney to a loyal customer. Let’s hope this doesn’t get into the next employee manual.

…here’s what’s happenin’:

• Remember in ‘04, when the WashState GOP was all a-flutter over trumped-up allegations of ballot miscounts? Now they’ve gotta answer to the Huckabee campaign’s similar charges.
• Starbucks to give in to pressure from the indies and offer free WiFi, sort of, with a lot of conditions.
• The city council’s allocated a $350,000 fund to help limited-income tenants of apartment buildings that turn condo. Mayor Nickels isn’t spending a dime of it.
• Internet “server farms” don’t employ many people (except in construction, while they’re being built). But they could be worth millions in tax breaks for the companies that run ‘em.
• Some in Seattle would really like more transit to the Eastside. Some Eastside politicians would rather just have more highway lanes.
• Bremerton woman mistakenly deposits meth in an ATM. Arrest-arity ensues.

…in Saudi Arabia arrested an American woman for sitting with a man at a Starbucks. (One of the news items about the incident included a pic of the chain’s Arab-world logo, in which the mascot mermaid is completely missing.)

NOW WE KNOW why David Letterman rattled off so many Mitt Romney jokes this past week—he wasn’t gonna get to tell ‘em much longer.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

• There goes the most-recent great hope for cooling down the heat of violence in Pakistan and vicinity.
• The bus tunnel’s open again. But the SLUT has been stalling intermittently.
• Do Wash. state Republicans stand a ghost of a chance of survival, let alone renewed relevance? The Seattle Times would like to think so. As for me, I think the local GOP will come back only when it can again field candidates of an Evans (or at least a John Spellman) level, and actively try to appeal to those of us who believe evolution is real and wrestling isn’t.
• It’s the law: Don’t text and drive.
• Starbucks is experimenting with sugar-free latte syrup.
• The good news about Puget Sound’s housing market? “Not as grim as rest of U.S.”

…in its incessant search for trends to parse, has suddenly discovered “The Starbucks Aesthetic.” As you assuredly already know, it’s onr of comfort, reassurance, self-congratulation, and smug pseudo-hipness.