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Intro

By Cira Riedel

We are also linked to Derek by his past. The smart, inscrutable Australian was our roommate for a whole summer at the legendary Surf Europe house in Hossegor when he was launching that very magazine. He then disappeared to Australia again amid much smirking and talk that he was now editing a porn magazine … We thought it was a rumour but this is exactly what he was doing. Before Surf Europe he was the editor of Australia’s Surfing Life, and then went on, as we mentioned, to keep the bunnies warm at Australia’s biggest-selling men’s magazine. He has been published in every major Australian daily. Recently, or so he claims, he has been the first dancer for Kevin Federline and is touring the USA, Japan and Eastern Europe….
His text is an insight into the distressing period of puberty and evokes the rage and forlornness of a teenager with a wry smile.

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The Sun Eventually Rises

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by Derek Rielly

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Photography by Angela Boatwright

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I was a morbid and unlovely child; a 12-year-old guitar prodigy whose weekends were spent wrapped in a Gibson Les Paul copy and facing a stacked 100-watt amplifier. I would sway within a cloud of shrieking feedback, muttering about killing my woman, escaping the noose by fleeing to Mexico and how, in general, Killing Was Fun. If my father’s Vietnam-era rifle that lay slumped in the corner of the hallway cupboard hadn’t had its bolt removed and I could’ve worked out a way to acquire sufficient ammunition, I would’ve happily gunned the town down, written a conceptual musical about it and watched with silent glee as my parents wept at my execution (which I would face with uncommon courage). This was natural behavior for a never-bullied child of academic parents who existed in the Disney-esque bubble of a crime-free suburb.
But then I discovered summer. I was 14. I’d blown a valve in the Marshall and had stepped into the backyard. Into a white summer morning. Where diamonds danced on the swimming pool (we had a pool?) and the family beagle lay asleep on the hot concrete driveway panting, her hind-quarters spasming as she dreamt.

Nearby, my elder brother knelt on freshly cut grass, his hair dripping into his eyes. His arms looked stronger and more tanned than I remembered as he rubbed a compound onto a lime-colored fiberglass surfboard. He looked up through his hair, showed his straight teeth and explained that he was a surfer now and that he’d been sharing lifts with an older kid from school to the beach, one hour away.

“You would love it,” he said. “Faggot,” I replied, and retreated to an acoustic I kept in the back shed in case of emergencies. But as the summer progressed, I was tortured by the elevation of my brother’s status. His stories of near-death and encounters with marine fauna held my family in awe. Girls with freckled cleavage wrapped in sarongs from Bali came to the house and didn’t leave until late. He didn’t wash or care about his clothes and he had never looked so good.
It was a longer and hotter summer than usual. For one month, the temperature hit 40 or more every day. On the hottest day of the year, I opened my curtains and prised the window open. A warm wind breathed on my face. A cicada jumped onto my bed. The house was quiet. It was school holidays and my parents were at work and my brother had left for the beach long before I woke.

I walked up the hallway to my brother’s room. I didn’t stop, as I usually did, to shoulder my father’s rifle. The door to my brother’s bedroom swung open to an Aladdin’s cave of men surfing and women in bikinis. No plaster was visible between the torn pages from magazines. His bed was unmade, the sheets stained. His clothes formed a volcano in the middle of the carpet. A block of melted wax was a surreal sculpture on the windowsill. I thought, this was how the family’s demi-God existed? In squalor? I thumbed one of the magazine carcasses. The colors were blue, pink, yellow, white, red and brown. The colors of the ocean, flowers and skin; of air-brushed surfboards and bleached hair. Summer colors. Gay colors.

“My brother’s such a faggot,” I said aloud, dropping the magazine, scooping up the loose change from his desk, and walking to the hallway cupboard. I wasn’t convinced, yet. Not about surfing or summer. But my eyes were open.

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William White

By Sanja Vidackovic
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A rather non-descript young man with tousled hair and wearing a pink tee shirt seats himself on an isolated stool on the stage which Ben Harper will soon occupy with all his musical entourage. The first plucked strings cause the crowd to stop and pay attention, the first lines sung give rise to surprise and admiration and transport us into a carefree reverie. We knew about William White a long time before this concert, but it was on this evening that I really felt the breadth of his charisma for the first time.
Despite his busy schedule, William quickly decided that he would also like to be part of the eMOTION edition. With his song Time to Make a Change he wanted to create a counterbalance to the chosen text by Derek Rielly, and has depicted the everyday life of the young man in Derek’s story ten years after the lines were written. He makes clear the importance of, like a sunflower, turning your face towards the sun in order to leave the shadows behind.

www.williamwhite.ch
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Lyrics:
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„Time To Make A Change“ by William White
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Its time to make a change
Not my face and not my name
But something deep inside
Time to hear the voice
Separate it from the noise
Learn what I got to learn
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Cause we’ve come far and life’s been good to me
Looks like I’ve found myself a home
So come on over here and make sweet love to me
I promise I won’t go
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Time to do things right
Fill my thought with light
Know what I got to know
Its time to read the signs
Line them up and make them rhyme
Get where I’m going to go
Chorus
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So come on over here and make love to me
‘Cause it’s with you I feel at home
Come on over here and make sweet love to me
Tomorrow I won’t go.
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