Transcribed with Otter.ai
Guest April Grieman
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Hey everyone, welcome to unique ways with Thomas Girard and audio podcast, we have a notable guest on today. She’s an American designer, widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. She’s also credited with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s. According to design historian Stephen Heller, she was a bridge between the modern and the post modern, the analog and the digital. Please join me in welcoming. April greiman, welcome. Thank you. Are you ready for 20 questions?
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Yeah, more or less, and it’s funny thinking about myself as a bridge. I’m I’m getting a visual on that
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me as a bridge. Awesome. Okay, question one, tell me a little bit more about yourself. What do you
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do? What I do is
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a little of everything. I’m an full time educator at USC Roski School of Art and Design. I am
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focusing a lot on my fine art photography. So I’m focused a lot on making big prints here in our studio, and I’m also doing one or two projects in design
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annually.
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And, yeah, so that’s, that’s kind of what I do. I also garden, and I also like to cook.
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Awesome. Question two, what’s a key piece of knowledge that makes you different?
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I different than what,
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different than others. Are different than what, yeah, I suppose different than others.
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I guess that I’m somebody that never really was clear on what I wanted to do, except I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be a graphic designer.
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Great question three is, why this of all things? Why do you do what you do?
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Because I have a insatiable drive and interest in learning things. And,
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you know, pursuing things that I really know nothing about and can explore kind of in the way that I explore great
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and some people struggle with four but the question is, what does your future look like? I
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i hope it looks as bright as it is now,
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I feel like I pretty much have a I’m
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kind of living the dream, not that I don’t have complaints, not that my body is not revealing its age. And so I guess, you know, I just hope my future is healthy and continues to allow me to be creative pretty much every day,
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great and five, we say, is unique to this show. The question is, let’s talk about location. How does the notion of place play into what you do?
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Place really became everything for me in the late 70s, when I arrived from New York to Los Angeles, I never expected to live in Los Angeles. And in fact, when I left New York to come out to work on a project, I mean, I barely, I just told my parents and maybe one or two other people, because I never expected to really stay in Los Angeles. And then I discovered really the light and the kind of space that we get to inhabit here, I was just completely overwhelmed and going to Death Valley, and never having been in a desert before. And so for me, you know, this place is desert
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and light and
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um,
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kind of open space.
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Great six is, if you had to start from the beginning, what advice would you give your former younger self?
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Uh,
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boy, how many hours do we have?
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I don’t know. You know, I’m not. I’m not somebody that tries to hang on too much with regret and tries not to dwell too much on the past. So I, I.
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I think, I think I could have been
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a more overt feminist.
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I don’t know if that’s advice, but I kind of shied away from getting very involved and a
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lot because the environment, and the particular environment here, I felt I was, I didn’t fit in,
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and I so, yeah, I feel like I could have
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put a little bit more energy into that and really kind of thinking more about what it was at that time in the late 70s,
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but I kind of shied away, and I think I would advise myself to be a little bit more forthcoming and A little bit more assertive in that regard,
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even so I think I, you know, I
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did a pretty good job trying to
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make sure my voice was heard and to, you know, kind of forge ahead in a man’s world.
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That’s not a very good answer. I think it’s all over, but, you know, I mean, I guess in a way, it is a regret, and I but,
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yeah, I think I just advised myself in certain regards to be a little bit more focused on other than, you know, design and photography, because I I really kind of tunneled in,
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yeah, so you were going to say something, Thomas,
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no, I was entering the next question. But that’s okay.
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Okay, so seven is what’s a day in your life? Like
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day in
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my
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life?
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So I’m a night person,
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so I stay up pretty late, and so the day is starts with kind of like, uh,
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damn. It’s, it’s morning, it’s the sun’s out, you know, I
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I wake up. I do my 10 minutes of Pilates and yoga stretching. I sometimes do a little bit of arm weights. I tend to read my email.
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I said, actually, sometimes I wake up really early, even though I go to bed at one or two o’clock in the morning. Some of the wake up early and sunrise. And then I do read my email. I always read my email, most of it,
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and
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any messages that have come in. Then I do my little stretches, then I reluctantly get up. Sometimes I get up, and then I decide I have to go back to bed because I’m not ready. So I would say I start really moving around around 10 in the morning,
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which is,
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yeah, and then I’m trying to currently, and since my New Year’s resolve is to get something in my stomach in the morning, I really can’t really eat much. I my system doesn’t like foods in the morning, nor does it like coffee in the morning. So
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lately, I’ve been drinking a kind of a mushroom matcha drink.
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It’s kind of disgusting sounding but it’s pretty color. And then I slowly get ready. I go out to my garden. I see how my plants are doing, if they need water, I watch the news, usually for about half hour or so. I then proceed out towards my studio.
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I always drink a black ice tea in the morning, and that’s my first caffeine. And then I come in the studio, and then our hours are like 1230 till about seven, and we don’t take a lunch break, so we just work that continuous time
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just got a nice coffee delivered to me right now, a cappuccino is staring me in the face,
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coffee in the I only have coffee in the afternoon, and then what do I do? Then the evening is kind of tricky. My husband, Michael is an architect, and we both have our own studios and,
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you know, time schedule, so we touch base and see if we’re going home and try to pick up something at the market to cook for if we’re just going to stop and get something to eat. And we do a little of both. You know,
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I.
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And then,
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yeah, go home, eat something, or having eaten something, then pretty boring life, huh? So
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during the day, always music in the studio. I can’t work without music makes me crazy if there’s no music of all kinds. But anyway, the evening
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my eyes have gotten pretty bad, I have to say, having probably dealt for too long with a screen that radiated
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in the mid late 80s before Apple got their act together to give you an anti radiation screen so
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I can read in the morning, and I read during the day, but at night, I’m finding I just my eyes just cannot take it anymore. So it’s really kind of depressing. And then so I watch TV. My husband thinks I watch way too much TV, but I find him kind of standing behind my chair watching TV, and I watch movies, news, and, you know, some special season programs, lots of those, which probably we all got
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brainwashed into doing one during COVID, when everybody was like binging everything, right?
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And then my husband goes to bed way earlier, and then I proceed to watch couple more episodes of something, or I might just catch a late night movie.
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And then, yeah, I drink water along the way, try to get eight glasses of water and now, yeah, given way too much information about my boring life,
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that’s great.
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Eight is lifelong learning is a popular topic. How do you stay up to date?
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Well, I don’t know if I’m ever up to date.
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I found that out buying my first computer, you know, like, you know, if it’s state of the art, it’s clearly not working, but, you know,
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so it’s really hard to keep up to date. I really feel like teaching has been one of the greatest benefits for my being an eternal student.
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I have to say that I taught on and off, mostly on for about 25 years in architecture schools,
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and I learned so much
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in so many ways, and it really
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enhanced my
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ways of thinking about learning and continuing learning, including, you know, doing more research and thinking more about what I think about.
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But I have taught, you know, in the early 80s, I was director California Institute of the Arts design program. Then I jumped out the door for for about six years, and then I joined faculty at Southern California Institute of Architecture. I taught there, on and off for 20 years, mostly on. Then I taught for about eight years at Woodbury University School of Architecture, and I took one year off, and now I’m tenured at USC Roski school. And boy, have things changed, you know, like from, you know, late 70s, teaching
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at Cal Arts and then becoming director, where I tried to introduce Macintosh. But for example, when I was at a design program at Cal Arts,
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I was getting pretty bashed by the elder male population in New York for not being a designer and being a fine artist. And sadly, I took some of that to heart and was very discouraged. And so I, for example, like, got a TA that was in the film video school to work with me in overnight sessions. And there I learned how to not only shoot professional video equipment, but I learned to kind of use an analog computer and a synthesizer and so that that’s a great example of, you know, kind of ongoing
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learning. So I got the bug for technology that, you know, helped me jump into using electronic paint boxes for some years, and some shooting professional video, some TV spots for companies. Then the Macintosh came out, and I jumped to a different paint box. And, you know, so,
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yeah, so I’ve always, I mean, I think I’ve always just loved being a student at learning things and so.
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So
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kind of learning how to learn is really something I could attribute to
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being an architecture school. So
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I think that that’s been a really big boon to my overall
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creative complexion and
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but I teach now, and it’s,
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you know, like,
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it’s so rare that students and I teach it in the grad design program at Roski, and it’s so rare that people want to do a website. I mean, it’s just like the website, you know, that’s so last millennium already, you know, and everybody already had a website when they were in grade school. So just learning about, like, the platforms they use and and
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kind of the the the lingo, you know,
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that in itself, is pretty interesting to me, having been somebody always interested in words, therefore typography, words as image, you know,
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images, text, so, etc, etc,
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great. And nine is about tools. Can you talk about the digital and in the analog
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the tools,
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which ones? I mean, currently, what? Concurrently? No, I’m using the same tools. I still shoot video. I still, you know, pretty much married to my
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Apple equipment.
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Use my phone exclusively for shooting photos and videos, but I have for a million years, it seems like now
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I’ve ventured into for about five years now, I’ve been working
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with a colleague, collaborator and genius, Dale herits that in the UK,
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on
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augmenting, doing some AR work with a couple of my printed pieces of graphics.
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Although I don’t consider design quarterly. Does it make sense
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a graphic design? It’s a video computer graphic printed offset lithography, but we’re augmenting that, and that’s a lot of fun learning about AR. And I’m also working here in the studio with a really great assistant, you Shan, who is we’re using AI in my photography, and we are sourcing our own material. So I don’t know how many hundreds of my images he uploaded to. I don’t even know what program we’re we’re using. We’ve used mid journey, stable diffusion, something, Firefly, etc, etc. We’re using them all. I think he may be inventing his own as we speak, but So using my own resource materials, and then kind of building new images with, you know, the AI version of it into maybe a landscape or something else, that is one of the themes running through my photography. And
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so, yeah, I think that’s we have a big commercial printer, a big Canon printer, and it’s like 46
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inches
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wide. So what is that like? A meter and a half. It’s a big machine. We keep that running every day. So it’s really, really a luxury and a great delight to print my own photography. I always print large scale images here.
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And so that pretty much wraps up. I have a an electric car.
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It’s kind of a tool.
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What kind of car do you have? I don’t drive. Actually, I knew you were going to say that. I can tell from your photos.
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Go to number 10 here. Work, life balance. Life work balance. Can you talk about that?
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Work is life? I mean, it’s there’s no delineation there. I feel like that’s another blessing that I my life just allows me to flow pretty creatively
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and luckily, I have a husband who, you know, we’re on the same kind of
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flow path of just, you know,
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just
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not seeing what I do every day is work, but more kind of who I am,
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I.
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And if you weren’t doing what you do now, what would you be doing?
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I’d probably be in jail. No, I don’t.
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Maybe doing i for a while, I worked on a big project with Ken Smith, landscape architect, and
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I worked a few times on projects that had involved a landscape architect, and I always
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since I had, you know, for me, maybe not so much published, but a pretty rich creative and fine art career, or, you know, kind of pursuit journey.
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And really always liked plants and landscape, and I I probably would have considered going to a school where I studied landscape architecture.
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I also have a big body of work and in the built environment where I get hired to work as a color consultant for materials, palettes and,
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and then you know from that it ends up being three dimensional things, or a signage package, or a brand of a building or and, and I’m always like since I’ve really liked
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changing scale and and I’m like a material, you know, freak. I love textiles and different materials, including plants and whatever that I think that that might have been a pretty satisfying thing for me, not that I think of landscape architecture as being an extension of gardening, but I think to combine kind of
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bigger ideas that include plants
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and the actual material landscape, I think that would have been a really good thing for me, challenging and, and,
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yeah, but other than that,
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since I never really knew what I wanted to do, and very often still don’t accept what’s in front of me right now,
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I think that
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can’t think of anything else. As a kid, I wanted to be a nurse, and then every time I’d see blood like if my mother cut her finger in the kitchen, I would faint. So my mother suggested that I not be a nurse. That could be a problem. But I really always kind of liked everything, and tried everything. So I don’t know,
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yeah, so very long, kind of circuitous answer, but I did my best, great, and you kind of just answered this. But what would you not like to do with your career?
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Um, with my career? I mean, what?
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I don’t know. I I’ve also been really blessed to have so many great clients. And I’ve, you know, mostly, most of my projects and design have been small and medium sized companies or projects or entrepreneurs. And I’ve always just been so lucky that I didn’t have to market myself, and that I just got always a nice flow of work with kind of independent thinkers and,
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so
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maybe, maybe the few times I’ve worked with bigger companies, like fortune 500 companies, they were pretty unsatisfying. I never really had maybe one project where I did,
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they accepted a tiny firm to work on their project. But for the most part, I was brought in, like to think tanks. Remember the days of think tanks? That doesn’t exist anymore, that expression probably, but,
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and, and somehow those ended up
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being pretty
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unsatisfactory to me, creatively, and also in terms of, you know, output,
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too much during, well, we would, let’s say, in the 80s and 90s, when I would be involved with some companies, then I always felt like what came out of that they love to pick my brain and get Me in meetings, and then what would come out of that would be to homogenize. And I felt like I, in a way, yeah, I would never want to do that anymore.
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Great. And how about a favorite word, quote or sentence, oh boy.
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Sorry
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I said, oh boy, but that’s not exactly my that’s, that’s one of my favorite things to say, oh, boy, um, I would say,
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think about what you think about
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great and a least favorite word, quarter sentence,
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um.
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No,
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if you had to pick one word to describe yourself, what word would it
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be? Yes,
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you talked a bit about this, but what keeps you up at night?
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Definitely politics. Currently, it’s absolutely terrifying to me what’s going on.
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It has required me to do extra breathing exercises and,
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you know, play with singing bells.
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Yeah, I feel
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really sad
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and really torn about I feel sad about what’s going on in the world.
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And I feel really torn, not knowing if I mean not only politics, but the environment, all the all of the above that we all are all talking about. And I That sounds
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like I’m guilty, but I I stress over a little bit over,
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you know, where did my generation, you know? Where do we participate in this? Because it’s, you know, it just keeps evolving and, you know, you
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know.
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But on the other hand, I,
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I just know. I have a brother who’s a he’s retired, but he’s a meteorologist, and I, I’m very aware of how many ice ages and how many global warmings we’ve had, you know, over the, you know, x billion of years that we’ve been a little, you know, sphere. And
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so that helps me feel like, you know, you know, I can only do what I can do and try to, you know, remain conscious about that and contribute in a way that’s a positive. I, you know, my intent is positive again, like the overall effect, I don’t know, over, you know,
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a few decades, and that’s what I’m referring to, as far as keeping me up at night, like, where,
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you know, where did my generation go astray, you know, with the environment and various things. You know, so.
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But anyway, I don’t know. I think I’ve said enough about that. I’m starting to feel bad.
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17, do you have a dream you’re chasing?
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No,
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what inspires you?
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Everything, really, everything.
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I mean, for sure, music and art, but I’m landscape, light,
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color. How
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about advice you’d like to share?
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That’s the one thing I don’t do,
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okay? And 20, I guess one could say, you know, expect change.
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Great. And 20, how can our listeners keep tabs on you, and what’s our call to action?
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Aprilgrimon.com
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would be more of my fine art work,
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photography, public art.
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And my last name is G, R, e, i, m, a, n, so aprilgrimon.com
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and then my design consultancy is made in space.la,
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no.com
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and I’m at, you know, April griman on Insta, and,
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yeah, you could try to get me to follow you back on Facebook, maybe. But that’s pretty much it. I’ve never,
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yeah, that’s That’s enough. I’m in downtown Los Angeles, right on Broadway, between the Apple Store and the Orpheum, and it’s another way, you know, if you can figure out what floor I’m on and what building, then just come up and knock on the door.
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Great. Well, thanks so much, but not in the morning,
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because we’re not here. Is
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that? Thanks so much. Such a privilege to have you on today. Thank you, and thank you so much for your patience with me, Thomas. I know you probably thought I was an idiot because I changed and rescheduled so many times, but honestly, sincerely, I wanted to do this. It’s just I’ve had a heck of a last year, so lot of craziness.
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Thank you so much. All right, thank.
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