What would you do for 15 minutes of fame? Would you drink 29 cups of Starbucks coffee in a day for a chance at micro-celebrity?

At least one boy would. That’s Winter, whose goal’s to visit every company-owned Starbucks store. Fans and voyeurs have been tracking Winter’s journey via his website, Starbucks Everywhere, for years; now, Winter’s got a whole film — titled Starbucking — documenting his bizzare adventure.

Why? Well, it’s basically the one unique idea Winter thought up to distinguish himself.

Strangely, Winter seems hyper-aware of the utter meaninglessness of his quest. No, the project has no purpose, and no, the project actually helping anyone, Winter says more than once in Starbucking.

Winter basically spends his days racing from one Starbucks to another. And despite its admitted meaninglessness, this lifestyle, Winter says, makes him happy.

Happiness, of course, can be widely defined. This is a guy who’s taken lotsa meds, who’s suddenly changed his name to Winter, who fails at even strange, cerebral, long-distance romantic relationships, and who nurses a heavy strip club habit.

Mostly, the guy seems sadly lonely — which explains why he derives so much pleasure from the bits and pieces of attention he culls via his Starbucks project. He saves the holiday cards he gets from Starbucks employees. He shows off the signed copy of Howard Schultz’s book about Starbucks.

This narcissistic project, of course, requires a rather myopic view of the world. Winter opines that his project shows people should spend less time working and more time on self-actualization — yet doesn’t quite connect the similarities between the meaninglessness of an unfulfilling job and the equal meaninglessness of trailing new Starbucks stores.

Perhaps Winter’s myopia’s most visible in his seeming conceptualization of Starbucks as a benign force that just is. While Winter acknowledges that Starbucks probably does unfairly drive out local stores by engaging in predatory practices, he dismisses this problem as that of a few bad apples employed at Starbucks. Similarly, Winter stays conveniently oblivious to Starbucks’ coffee sourcing and labor practices.

The oblivion lets Winter to frame his project as a sort of meaningless, dada-esque endeavor — as opposed to one that’s instrumental in funding and driving a predatory corporation desperate to market itself as a simple, benign, perhaps even positive part of our increasingly homogenized landscape.

I mean, do ethics matter in desperate tactics for attention-getting? On his website, Winter provides links to reviews of Starbucking. “some good, some bad,” he notes, “but publicity is publicity.”

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