The Rialto Books Review vol.004 -- Out Now
The Rialto Books Review vol.002 is now available (https://www.broadaxepublications.com/rialto-books-review/the-rialto-books-review-vol004). The following pieces are printed in this edition.
On A Local Music Scene by Ryan Rosenberger
Diaries 1/1/19-1/31/19 by Martin Hall
The Chicago to Kenosha Line by Tom Porter
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On A Local Music Scene by Ryan Rossenberger:
“On the corner of Western & Cortez sits The Empty Bottle, a hole-in-the-wall music venue that can be easy to miss if you’re simply walking down the street. It is nameless in a sense, as if it possesses no real identity to anyone except the invisible misfits it attracts. However, with its dive bar feel and gloomy aesthetic inside, this Ukranian Village club has been a staple in Chicago’s independent music scene for years.
There is something appealing about hole-in-the-wall clubs such as this one. It’s not flashy, it’s not glamorous; it’s dirty and grungy in its toxicity, serving as a true relic from another era.
The atmosphere here is particularly intoxicating to those who have been shunned as outcasts by mainstream society. Though these outcasts lurk in the shadows out of the line of sight of a normal person going about their day, venues such as the Empty Bottle serve as calling cards for these nameless individuals to gather in the name of sharing a unifying experience — an experience that gives them an identity and a reason to exist.”
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Diaries 1/1/19-1/31/19 by Martin Hall
“1/29/19 — I admire the content of Kafka’s diaries, and he had not even set out to make them admirable. In them, there can be found a stunning portrait of existence today as it stands in relation to its own futility. Fiction acts in refinement, but fiction has always been a gesture. A gesture requires faith in its recipient that they will consider the display in earnest, whether they ultimately appreciate it, or disdain it. A gesture is ruined if the audience is a self-gratifying tyrant, one who has the habit of rubbing their great belly, like it were an erotic instrument, whenever someone brings before them even the smallest offering. Diary is then to the refinement of fiction a volatile skepticism. Its tone is an energy of greater imperative: this is theworld, the world is horrid, and all one can do is lay out one’s sensual understanding, manifest its basis to sense its subtlest removes. From its precepts, there is derived a power. The depiction of dreams and of a reality come the closest to unity in a diary. One perceives the world for colors and contours, for its symbols and hidden little agendas, and humanity grows blissfully unreal when a diary gets kept at home and in cafés...”
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Read The Chicago to Kenosha Line by Tom Porter in The Rialto Books Review vol.004
