This video from a CCLaP release party made me cry.

the Official Historía Historía© Band from Ron Stanford on Vimeo.

Absolutely gorgeous video shot two nights ago, at the release party for Eleanor Stanford's CCLaP book Historia, Historia, held near Philadelphia which is why I couldn't attend. Watching it today, and realizing that I was the first step in the process that eventually led to this joyous, drunken moment, really overwhelmed me for a moment and made me cry a little. It's hard for me to express in words how profound it is sometimes to be an arts administrator for a living, to be the little god who gives the thumbs-up on deserving projects and makes them live as a fully-formed creature in the world, a physical object that deserves to have a crazy, crowded party thrown for it. And to know that the unusual way I've decided to do things is succeeding, that we're making money hand over fist at a time when most of our colleagues are breaking even or losing money, winning awards and breaking internal sales records literally every month right now. Last year our gross revenue was $7,000, and I've been optimistically hoping that we might generate $10,000 in 2013; but at the rate we're going, it would not be outside the realm of possibility for us to end the year more like $12,000 or 13,000. And this is all while doing something I love, something that literally makes artists' dreams come true, something that makes the world a better place than before that thing existed, instead of still being in advertising and my job being to convince teenage girls to become skinny, dumb whores.

There are a whole lot of other things that go into making one of CCLaP's books a success besides just my work -- there is the entire editorial team, the author who writes the great manuscript in the first place, our marketing director who gets it promoted, the retailers who get it sold. But I have to admit, there's something extremely powerful about being the guy who caused step #1 of the process, and knowing that every step between #2 (write back the author) and #1000 (shoot slick professional video at raucous release party) would not exist without me starting the chain. Seeing videos like these are without question the biggest high points for me of running CCLaP, and makes all the crazy 80-hour workweeks I've been having to put in lately completely worth it.