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Living the Dream in the City of Angels
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October 2017 Vol 88:08 $4.95
08 2017
Swedes in Movieland Interview with Andreas Carlsson TIFF 2017
Swedish Press is the world’s leading magazine on all good things Swedish. An authority on design, business, culture and travel since 1929, Swedish Press delivers insightful news and commentary in a visually striking format. With a nod to the past, and a peek to the future, Swedish Press is your go-to source for updates and inspiration from Sweden. SWEDISH PRESS (ISSN 0839-2323) is published ten times per year (Feb, Mar, Apr, May, June, July/Aug, Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec/Jan) by Swedish Press Inc, 862 Peace Portal Drive, Suite #101, Blaine WA 98230 for $39 per year. Periodical postage paid at Blaine, WA 98230-9998 (No. USPS 005544). US POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Swedish Press, PO Box 420404, San Diego, CA 92142-0404 OFFICE: 9040 Shaughnessy Street, Vancouver, BC V6P 6E5 Canada US MAILING ADDRESS: PO Box 420404, San Diego, CA 92142-0404 WEBSITE www.swedishpress.com E-MAIL info@swedishpress.com TEL +1 360 450 5858 TOLL FREE +1 866 882 0088 PUBLISHER Claes Fredriksson Claes@swedishpress.com EDITOR Peter Berlin Peter@swedishpress.com
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4 Letters to the Editor 5 From the Editor’s Desk Swedish Headlines 6 Headline News: Swedish Moderation in Action 6 Borgström Blogg 7 Swedes in the News 8 Landskapsnyheterna Business 9 Business News 10 Company File: Susanne Karlsson
Swedish designed knitwear by Susanne Karlsson.
Feature 11 Living the Dream in the City of Angels Interview 14 Andreas Carlsson and the Art of Multitasking Global Swedes 16 Gudrun Giddings – President and Chair of SACC-LA
Lifestyle 18 Top Sju 19 Movie: Swedish Film Highlight at the Toronto International Film Festival 2017 Hemma Hos 20 Design: Swedish Architects Design Cliffside Infinity Pool in Södermalm 21 Treats à la Christer Larsson Swedish Press Connects 22 SCA – Swedish Council of America 23 SACC – Swedish-American Chambers of Commerce 24 SVIV – Svenskar i Världen 25 SWEA – Swedish Women’s Educational Association International 26 MIG Talks – Migrationsverket 27 Business Sweden In the Loop 28 Calendar and Events 29 Ads and Info 30 Sista Ordet Big Mushrooms and Small Wheels – Our Adventure from Oslo to Stockholm on a Vintage Tandem Bike
Cover images: (1) Palm trees lined the streets of downtown (1) Los Angeles © Songquan (3) (4) Deng (2) Hollywood Boulevard © Sean Pavone (3) Robert (5) Vargas Mural on the SB Tower Building in downtown Los Angeles © LATCB (4) Rodeo Drive street sign © Perseomedusa (5) West Beach, Santa Barbara, California © Meinzahn
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CONTENTS ( October 2017 )
ART DIRECTOR Joan Law Joan@swedishpress.com REPRESENTATIVES Calgary: Carin Pihl +1 403 931 0370 Thunder Bay: Elinor Barr +1 807 344 8355 Toronto: Gunilla Sjölin +1 905 751 5297 Winnipeg: Laurel Anderson-McCallum +1 204 255 5224 Los Angeles: Birgitta Lauren +1 310 201 0079 New York: Timothy Lyons +1 732 685 3747 San Diego: Sue Eidson +1 858 541 0207
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Swedish Press
Downtown Los Angeles. Photo: Melpomen
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Company File
Allt om Stickat By Birgitta Lauren
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hat Swede doesn’t adore wearing sweaters – especially home-knit sweaters. Susanne Karlsson has knitted all her life, and has had various highend wholesale and retail knitwear businesses in Los Angeles for 27 years and New York for 8 years. She now owns 4 different businesses which she says “are all about knitting,” and she has truly taken the love of Swedish handknitted sweaters and designs to a whole new level. The brand Susanne Karlsson caters to the very high-end boutiques with her innovative, soft, beautiful knits from dresses to tops, scarves and pants. Her brand SK Fli, with partners Barbara Boman and Darlene Valle, is still in its infancy waiting for extra funding to fly. SK Fli is a collection of timeless, sophisticated yet unconventional silhouettes to be worn in multiple ways for the modern often traveling woman. In soft, luxurious knit fabrics and
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clean modern lines for comfort that all fit into a little Kube for easy travel. She is extremely proud of Bläanks, with her partner Judy Pokonosky. Bläanks is a line of individually customized premium knit blankets, scarves and robes, marketed to hotels, spas, corporations or individuals. They are all made to order in fantastic quality knit yarn in Swedish-inspired designs with Susanne’s unique dye-pressing techniques which she works with a local dye house to accomplish. After knitting organic cotton, she brushes mud on it, lets it dry in the sun, hammers the mud into the fabric, and then washes it, resulting in a very unique crackled multidimensional texture. Each customer will get their own unique color specifications. Ray Kappe, owner of LA’s most prestigious Southern CA Institute of Architecture school just ordered custom scarves for gifting during his upcoming 90’s birthday bash. But Susanne’s real baby, just birthed and delivered in August, is MorDotter, a mother/daughter collaboration between Susanne
and her daughter Hanna Cousins, an artist and designer. Hanna hand-draws the designs on most of the fabrics, and was also Susanne’s baby model when she first started making baby clothes. Together they have designed high-end leather and knit wear for moms and babies, thereby deviating from common trends. The mother-daughter line has a Rock’n Roll flair, with a new style, clean lines and modern, very influenced by their Swedish heritage and minimalist designs. It features black leather jackets, with cream knits and lots of stripes for the new young mom and baby. The baby collection includes custom baby Moses baskets, draped in a hand-knit blanket. It is of course “handmade” in organic yarns and made to order with a delivery time of 2 – 3 weeks. After 35 years designing Swedish knits for America’s wealthy, Susanne dreams of launching her knitwear in Sweden. It’s time.
www.instagram.com/susannekarlssonsweden www.susannekarlssonsweden.com www.blaanks.com www.mordotterla.com
Living the Dream
in the City of Angels Story by Madeleine Hultin, Madeleine Rask, Caroline Strömberg and Gudrun Giddings
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“I love Los Angeles. It reinvents itself every 2 days.” – Billy Connolly
os Angeles is a city that feeds on dreams – on making them, on breaking them and on inspiring them. Every day, people come to Los Angeles with hopes and expectations, not just for success in the film industry, but to experience everything that this amazing city has to offer. And who can blame them? Sunshine all day, every day, in combination with miles of beaches, makes living and visiting Los Angeles pretty great and it’s easy to understand why people flock to this fantastic city. Aside from the obvious attractions of amusement parks and movie studio tours, you’ll find magical LA sunsets including famous streets as Melrose Ave and Rodeo Drive with zip codes like Beverly Hills 90210. Los Angeles is filled with amazing things to see and do, every day of the year. There aren’t many other places where you can go surfing and snow-boarding on the same day!
The greater metropolitan city of Los Angeles is a big city and home to an estimated 18.6 million people. Considering that the Swedish-American community is well-established on the West Coast, you’ll find a lot of Swedes in the city. It’s estimated that already in the early 1900s, a lot of Swedish born, US immigrants lived in LA. Today, the City of Angeles has become a new “home away from home” for Swedish creatives, and it’s hard to visit the city without bumping into Swedes, hearing Swedish music on the radio or watching a movie without a Swede acting in it. The name Los Angeles comes from the Spanish language and means “The Angels”. But what many might not know is that the name is actually an abbreviation of the original name “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río Porciúncula” which means “Town of our lady the Queen of Angels of the River Porciúncula”.
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and the Art of Multitasking
Andreas Carlsson. Photo credit: Peter Svensson
ndreas Carlsson is a Swedish composer and songwriter, music producer, motivational lecturer and entrepreneur. He was also part of the famed Cherion Studios and a former judge on “Swedish Idol” among many other endeavors. Andreas has created a long and successful career both in Sweden and the US and is today based in Los Angeles. He has written songs along with Max Martin, Jörgen Elofsson and Desmond Child, for artists like Backstreet Boys, NSYNC,
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Bon Jovi, Katy Perry, Britney Spears and Celine Dion, and has been both Grammy and Emmy nominated, all during his continuous development of various film and TV projects. He has also been running the AMB Schools which he co-founded in Sweden. AMB is short for The Academy of Music & Business, a school that focuses on music and connecting the real world with education. Andreas loves to have many things going on, making the most out of every day, always with a huge smile and a lot of positive energy.
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Hej Andreas, you have a lot of things happening as a music producer, songwriter, motivational lecturer and your inspiring work with the AMB schools. A lot of Swedish people also know you from TV programs such as “Swedish Idol” and “X-Factor”. How did you get started in your career? Well, when I was 19 years old I went to see the rock group Chicago preform in Sweden. When I got back-stage, I was able to strike up a conversation with the lead singer, Bill Champlin, and told him that I was going to the United States. He responded by offering me his contact information in LA, so once I landed at the airport in LA, I got in a cab and went directly to Bill’s house, rang the doorbell and ended up staying with him for the next ten days. Amazing things started to happen for me really quickly in LA. Later a Swedish newspaper heard about my story with Bill and wrote an article about it. Once the article was published, I was back in Sweden and there was a picture of me and Bill, next to photos of Roxette, Ace of Base and ABBA, with the message “Välkommen in i gänget, stjärnor är vi allihopa!” (“Welcome to the gang, we are all stars!”) And then it all really started… What motivates you to keep going? I figure we know just two things for certain, that we are born and that we will die. In between, there are endless possibilities to make the most out of every day. I like to climb this mountain I invented for myself and achieve something new, go where I have never been before and outperform myself every day. That’s what makes me feel alive. What gets you up in the morning and how do you sustain this energy? My generator for happiness strives from movements. It is like a watch, with what’s called an automatic battery: You don’t have to manually wind the watch because the battery keeps going by your body’s movements. So, I don’t want to stand still, my drive is that I want to be on the move and keep going all the time.
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Your work with The Academy of Music & Business schools and inspiring young people is impressive. How did you come up with the idea of starting a school? I have an old friend, who also is a business partner, a great mentor and he is also a teacher. We said to each other “How about we create a school that we would have loved to attend when we were teens?” So, we started this school, where we connect the real world and education and also work with core values, individual development and team building. I think that it is not always what you know, it is who you are. We now have three schools in Sweden and are currently developing new academies, within other trades as well, under the AXB brand. Is it true that you might open up an Academy of Music and Business school in LA? Yes, we are currently exploring those possibilities and have some offers we are considering. Speaking of LA, what do you think is the best part about living and working in Los Angeles? LA is the place to dream big. It’s a city full of opportunities, but it takes a lot of effort and a long time to make those big dreams real. There is also a certain energy in Los Angeles that affects and inspires people, it attracts dreamers from all over the world. There is no other place that has the allure of making your dreams happen like LA does. It’s not always easy living in LA, sometimes I hate it and sometimes I love it. Thank you Andreas for your time and for sharing some of your stories. We look forward to seeing more of you and your successful and fun adventures in LA. And as you just inspired us, our last questions is: Who inspires you? My friend Gene Simmons, from the rock band KISS.
Interview with Andreas Carlsson by Gudrun Giddings and Caroline Strömberg, September 13, 2017
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