waiting for that co-opt moment

[photo credit: Dave Le]

So SF’s Santacon wound up in the East Bay yesterday. There’s coverage elsewhere of the people who got stranded, and the general frustration that abounded. I missed the ferry and took BART over to Jack London Square, mostly to be with old friends from Gigsville. I did wind up having fun (Santa’s raid on Bevmo was a highlight), but something was definitely weird about the event this year, and it had nothing to do with not being in SF.

Maybe it was knowing that it had been written up in Flavorpill… or dealing with the hippies that formed a drum circle… or the crowd of santas that spontaneously broke into the UCLA fight song…

But I left feeling like maybe it was time for an advertising exec somewhere to turn the whole thing into a 30 second commercial. It’s happened to better ideas. Reading Alan Greenspan’s auto-biography has encouraged my pre-existing enthusiasm for creative destruction, and I’m thinking that maybe Santacon is one more idea that needs to be co-opted to let something new and interesting replace it.

Either that, or I’m getting old.