Berwyn’s Caffe Palermo: The auteur inside the coffee shop

And there’s something you should know about the guy who just made your cappuccino: Vito Brancato may be one of the funniest and most imaginative filmmakers you’ve never heard of.

Caffe Palermo, 6510 Ogden Ave., is a front. Sure, you can get a really good cup of coffee there, as well as a homemade Sicilian cannoli, but the cafe is also known as “Cafe Gangster” in the film world. It serves as a sound stage, editing studio and full on film production company.

On any given day one walks into Caffe Palermo for a cup of coffee, they’ll find owner Vito Brancato behind a computer, working on his latest film. The 44 year-old Chicago resident opened Caffe Palermo in 2001 in what was once a cigar store, mainly to pursue his artistic passions.

“I needed a job, and [former tenant] Ronny Vrhel was moving down the street [to Cigars and Stripes] and said “why don’t you take over my space?” Brancato recalled. “So, I gutted it and opened a coffee shop. I wanted something small that I can operate with as little work as possible, so I can work on my films.”

The interior of Cafe Palermo is romantic to say the least. Lacy lingerie and other clothes hang across the ceiling on a clothesline and noirish film posters line the walls. Even the outside looks like your stepping into an Old World cafe off the streets in Italy.

Caffe Palermo offers an array of drinks and food, from lattes to hot ham and cheese “sangwiches” and specialty drinks such as the Cafe Nutella (made with Nutella and the Tony Montana (lots of caffeine).

But it is the film, not espresso, that define Brancato.

He began his foray in film on the Sports Channel with the first independent wrestling show in Chicago, he said.

“I used to promote wrestling, I wrestled, with Chicago Champions Wrestling in 1987,” Brancato said. “It ran for five years, but half way through the run, we started doing little comedy skits on the wrestling show. I was getting bored with wrestling.”

They started getting more of response for the comedy than the matches, Brancato said, and it soon became a full fledged comedy show called On Edge with the Razor – hosted byBrancato under his former wrestling name.

“It was like a really hard-edged Saturday Night Live, but Razor, was the central character,” he said. “Everything was written around this character. It really built a nice little cult following, but I couldn’t break into bigger media. We were kind of stuck.”

From there, Brancato produced his first feature, a low budget 80-minute film called, “The Life and Times of Tony D.” In the years since, Brancato has written and directed at least 20 different films and multi-episode series, he said. Among them, “Blackstone,” is a short film originally broadcast nationally on PBS on the anniversary of the JFK assassination.

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SuicideGirls launches cross-Canada burlesque tour in Vancouver

Popularly known for celebrating alternative models of feminine beauty, the SuicideGirls online community has launched a cross-Canada burlesque stage show. Photo courtesy SuicideGirls

Girls. Tattoos. Nudity.

Bring them onto a social networking platform and you get the Suicide Girls. Mutinous, dark, subversive — with a name one might otherwise expect from a punk rock band, the brand embodies rebelliousness in an attempt to challenge the social norms and taboos of our time.

Launched in 2001, SuicideGirls was a major social networking site long before the rise of Facebook and Twitter. It’s also a pinup website that features sexy, nude images of girls of varying body types, and serves as a platform for fans who appreciate these girls.

“SuicideGirls is named after the girls who commit social suicide by choosing not to fit into the society’s social dictates,” said Missy Suicide, co-founder of the website.

In celebration of the SuicideGirls community and the individual members’ own sexuality, the brand recently launched its cross-Canada Blackheart Burlesque performance tour. The tour previously travelled across the U.S. and Europe for five years in the early 2000s. Every show features a series of stripteases; five burlesque dancers sway to jazzy rhythms while removing their lingerie piece by piece.

In a culture obsessed with silicone-enhanced bodies, the Suicide Girls have set out to create a community that can appreciate alternative beauty. “We’ve got girls that are amputees, girls that have skin conditions, girls with different body types, and they all express themselves in different ways,” Missy Suicide said. “I get letters from girls all the time saying that they didn’t feel beautiful until they saw a girl who looked like them on SuicideGirls.

“Overall, our society has become more accepting to different styles of girls. But there’s still quite a long way to go before every person feels beautiful and confident about themselves.”

Suicide notes that, despite the popularity of networks like SuicideGirls, sexuality remains a socially taboo topic; even now, some people frown and scold if one speaks too passionately about it. But the Suicide Girls endeavor to make discussions of sexuality explicit; not only does the brand invite open conversation about the subject, professional photo shoots are designed for the girls to showcase their sexuality.

“Every person has a nude body and most adults engage in some sort of sexual activity,” said Suicide. “They should enjoy themselves and not be embarrassed of it. The photo sets on SuicideGirls are about how the girls want to be portrayed and how they feel sexiest about themselves.”

For the Blackheart Burlesque tour, Suicide aims to honour the history of the burlesque performance style while also injecting humour into the show.

“We used a lot of pop culture references. The girls are really into comic books and video games, so we draw lots of inspirations from that. It’s not like big spender, traditional burlesque shows,” said Suicide. “We still take the same sexy tease element and set it to modern soundtrack such as [the] Arctic Monkeys and Marilyn Manson. It’s going to be a very fun show.”

The Canadian Blackheart Burlesque Show’s first stop is at the Rickshaw Theatre on Wednesday, April 2, at 8 p.m.

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