Our pal Gena was at the John C. Reilly/Dewey Cox thing yesterday (where she took the picture above and a hundred others), and she tells us Reilly-as-Cox was amazing, "never breaking character and ad libbing with the best of them, sweating like a rock star and gyrating like one, too." He also busted out a cover of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab," which we want to hear so very badly. She adds, "The band was remarkably......

Looks like Blago's at it again. State legislative leaders are meeting again tomorrow to continue working on transit/casino/construction/dick-wagging, with the plan to head back to Springfield next week for--all together now--a special session. Maybe they could have a Very Special Session in which we learn about molestation or suicide or teen pregnancy. Blagojevich met with three legislative bigwigs today, but Mike Madigan wasn't one of them. Schedulig conflicts, says Madigan's camp. Never RSVPed to......

Fun Fun Fun Fest 2007 Recap from Super!Alright! on Vimeo. Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of Texas's only feminist bookstore. Throughout the week, they interviewed a bunch of indie fashion designers and D-I-Y websites—Etsy, Ornamental Things, 31 Corn Lane, and Aorta Designs—for the upcoming Stitch Fashion Show. They also did......

Aside from small-scale studies linking sexual-minority youth with high suicide attempt rates, there isn't a ton of concrete information about the higher risk of suicide among GLBT youth — U.S. data does not track sexual orientation as a factor in suicides. Still, there was a study in New Zealand that showed that they were six times more likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual peers, and it seems generally agreed upon that the risk is......

NBC5 is trotting out a sweeps special they've named "The Woman Who Knew Too Much" (video), an exclusive interview with Anne Lockett, a key witness in the 1993 Brown's Chicken massacre. Lockett waited nine years to tell police that her ex-boyfriend James Degorksi and his friend Juan Luna told her about committing the crime, and in these interviews attempts to explain what took her so long. Degorski is still awaiting trial, but his alleged accomplice......

You might know who Rutu Modan is. If you don't, you should. One of the most celebrated Israeli cartoonists, she's received four Best Illustrated Children's Book Awards from Jerusalem's Israel Museum, and The Israel Ministry of Culture named Rutu Modan the Young Artist of the Year in 1997. She has been a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation since 2005. We've fallen in love with her Mixed Emotions blog on the New York......

Folks sure are feeling God-y today. Both Neil Steinberg and Harold Henderson are both dipping their column toes in the divine waters. "That must be one hell of a galaxy that God's been busy constructing, somewhere far, far away, because He's sure careless when it comes to keeping tabs on his flock 'round these parts. If the Lord were on the ball, earthwise, then 24-year-olds would not kill themselves," Steinberg writes, in reference to Jim......

This is part of Chicagoist's continuing coverage of the Chicago International Film Festival. Rule #1: Dead Rock Stars do not make for happy stories, especially when the DRS in question is Ian Curtis, lead singer for Joy Division who committed suicide at the tender age of 23. The last half hour of Anton Corbijn's new biopic Control is especially hard to watch, knowing what's coming, but this movie does justice to both Curtis and the......

It's been confirmed. Orlando Jones, John Stroger's godson who avoided being interviewed by the FBI in conjunction with a hosptial shakedown in Las Vegas, committed suicide on a Michigan beach. Not only is this a tragedy for the people involved, but we're really disappointed with the Jesuits, as well -- The Rev. Donald McGuire has been convicted of molesting two boys in Wisconsin, faces a new accusation of sexual abuse, and his Jesuit religious......

They didn't coerce anyone out of this one -- Chicago mob kingpins guilty in decades of crime. And a relative of a mob murder victim wasted no time applauding the guilty verdicts in the Family Secrets case. Signed, sealed, can't be delivered --Heavy rain forced Stevie Wonder to cancel his concert Monday at the Charter One Pavilion on Northerly Island. It was rescheduled for tonight. David Letterman and Oprah are BFF now. Screw The......

You know, all these food posts today made us hungry around the offices. If they've done the same for you, here's some reading material for you while you we ourselves a plate of something. Just the kind of publicity BP needs right now. The source of an oil leak that made its way to Munster, Indiana's storm sewers Monday night was one of BP's seeping, inactive pipes. In addition to jurors getting to view......

Like many school-age children, Chicagoist was definitely one to doodle in our notes. We filled many a sketchbook, inviting our friends to even add their own stuff, which we have to remember to check up on, in case any of those drawrings are eBay-able these days. We even kept random notebooks just because we liked particular sketches, especially at the expense of first-period Econ. As years passed, our illustrative skillz fell by the wayside, which......

Much to the enjoyment of many of our readers, Macy’s can’t seem to catch a break. It’s no secret that sales are down, a gracious amount stemming from local boycotts. Just this Monday their food court came down with a severe case of drosophila melanogaster (we did that from memory – damn you, freshman bio!), garnering a shutdown from the Health Department. Macy’s earned the right to reopen this morning, but with last night’s news,......

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the......

During Kumail Nanjiani’s (all-too-short) set Friday night at the Vic, the comedian had a couple of woo-ers. Not suitors, per se, but people doing shout-outs to basically anything he mentioned. The most notable “Woo!” came when he started a joke about waiting for the train, which caused him to reflect that he’d never heard anyone give interjectoral props to the CTA in his life. After incidents like last Tuesday’s hour-long shutdown on the Green Line......

After being shuttered for three years amidst a series of complains of poor management and DCFS investigation, Maryville Academy's City of Youth has re-opened. When Maryville was shut down in 2003, nearly 270 wards of the state called the Des Plaines campus home. Increasingly frequent acts of violence and sexual assault, a suicide on campus and bad management led to DCFS' decision to remove their wards from Maryville, with a mandate that Maryville review and......

There is so much going on this weekend that is guaranteed to keep you from getting a whole lot of sleep. Take a nap and enjoy! Tonight in the Kinzie Corridor you'll find music, fashion, and art for a paltry $10. We are pretty excited about seeing the magical sounds of Chicago's Telefon Tel Aviv. The $10 ticket gets you the address to the loft party, free beer from 10 p.m. - 4 a.m., and......

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. passed away last night in New York from brain damage due to a fall several weeks earlier. We never knew him, with the exception of Tankboy, who met him once, but we loved him like that teacher in high school, the only one you ever cared to finish your homework for or make an effort. His grammar was not English teacher perfect, and his paragraphs were curt, sometimes one sentence. He was,......

The week in CTA has started off in typical fashion: sad and disappointing. The traffic report we heard on the radio spoke of an "accident" on the Red Line at Wilson. We thought it was interesting to hear the CTA mentioned in a traffic report, but we know accident is code for suicide. Chicagoist hates to hear about that. Whatever inconvenience that might be for a commute, we are always reminded that the human lives......

Chicagoist is not easily star struck. We’ve done our fair share of entertainment-biz mingling, and the last time we remember getting that knot-in-stomach, sweaty-palm, motor-mouth anxiety about meeting a “star” was when a third-string catcher for the Milwaukee Brewers visited our 5th grade class to talk about staying off drugs and saying our “pleases” and “thank yous.” Imagine our surprise last March when the old nerves started to jangle at the prospect of meeting Rocky......

Chicago came in #44 in a ranking of the world's cities based on quality of life. The Field Museum got a new totem pole to replace the one they returned to an Alaskan tribe. A couple of historic bridge houses on the Monroe Street Bridge over the Chicago River's south branch are getting major makeovers. There's a 3rd videotaped bar fight involving an off-duty Chicago police officer. He's the brother of the guy who......

The world over, there is no place we'd rather be than Chicago. Sometimes though, with spring bringing only blustery winds and rain, it's nice to bury ourselves in a book that puts us someplace warm and dry. We'd been told about Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat books sometime ago, wrote it down in our moleskine, and forgot about it. So when three people in the last week mentioned Block to us, we thought it was......

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Ravinia can't start their CSO shows til the big-mouthed cicadas are gone. A Naperville man tried to commit suicide as an alternative to serving 20 months in prison for embezzlement. We heard this story last night on the news, and it broke our hearts more than a little bit. Three college friends got together to celebrate spring break at a Chinatown restaurant. An hour later they died in a car crash on Lower Wacker.......

This weekend we thought we would get you in that holiday spirit with some Christmas parties and shopping. With all that family and travel next weekend, this is really your last weekend of the year to let loose. As always, feel free to leave information on other events around the city in the comments section. This weekend is the holiday bazaar at Country Club Chicago, 1100 N. Damen. The bazaar is from noon - 6......

Christopher Durang is still Christopher Durang, more or less. A generation after skewering religious hypocrisy (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You), theatrical pretensions (The Actor’s Nightmare), and pop psychology (Beyond Therapy), Durang brings his wacky situational humor tinged with the dark and surreal to Miss Witherspoon, a reincarnation fairy tale now playing at the Next Theatre. Durang fans may be relived to know the playwright is still feeding his inner 16-year-old drama geek:......

Sometimes when we wake up and splay the Chicago newspapers across our desk, certain themes just pop out at us. We're like John Nash from A Beautiful Mind, circling headlines with markers and attaching connecting strings with masking tape and pushpins. In between the seasonal religious controversies and potential parking-dibs comment bait this morning, today's theme was guns: real ones, fakes ones, and illegal ones. While CBS 2 was still talking about the fallout from......

Tonight the Axl Rose freak show currently known as Guns N' Roses hits Chicago. We know the following from their tour thus far: Axl has booted Eagles Of Death Metal from the bill, but decided to keep on the half-naked antics of the Suicide Girls and the half-baked antics of Sebastian Bach*. Axl will not hit the stage until at least two hours after the conclusion of the last opening act. And that’s if he’s......

Chicagoist has personally never had any big to-dos at Thanksgiving. The perennial holiday has not, for us, ended with anyone coming out of the closet, any drinks hurled into the fireplace, or the birth of sibling estrangements. We can't comprehend, then, being held at gunpoint by a psychotic criminal on a day for which one should be thankful. By now everyone has heard about the tragic murder-suicide on South Jeffery. At around 1:30 a.m. Thursday,......

We might not have gotten a shiny new game console this weekend, but we have crime to comfort us: A 58-year-old patient at Provena Mercy Medical Center in Aurora died in a police shootout on Saturday. Johnnie Russell holed himself up in his room in a 4.5 hour standoff with local police, at one point taking a 71-year-old fellow patient hostage. Russell eventually opened his door and fired a shot; police opened fire in kind.......