Hell Hath No Fury Like A Villager Scorned

Village residents are the kind neighbors you need on your side — fiercely protective, totally devoted, annoyingly uppity, curmudgeonly crotchety and probably some of the last people you’d want to piss off with a movie shoot:

During a visit to the [I Am Legend] set on Mon. Oct. 30, it was clear what sort occasional inconveniences residents face. They range from the minor, as in not being able to walk down certain sidewalks near the park, to the medium, like having to use the back door to enter a couple of buildings, to the major, like fumes from the fiery explosions wafting into apartment windows all night from the pyrotechnics below.

“My dog got sick,” said Kim Hastreiter, a neighbor. “He’s nervous about lightning and thunder, and they set off explosions every 20 minutes from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. one night. It shook the building.”

Hastreiter said that the first few days the filming was cute, and the first week was sort of exciting, but by the second week it was annoying and by the third she was angry.

“I haven’t slept for three weeks,” she said. Hastreiter turned down the production company’s offer to black out her windows with Duvetyn — an opaque fabric that will block the bright movie lights. Many residents have taken them up on it, but Hastreiter said it’s not just the lights.

“They yell at you if you walk your dog on the sidewalk in front of your own building,” she said. “If this were outside of the mayor’s house this wouldn’t be happening.”

So what’s one to do? Take it out on the lowly P.A., of course:

It’s not all roses for the production people either. The majority of the production assistants are college age, yet face the daunting task of dealing with complaints from a variety of people. Some people have even physically threatened the P.A.’s, according to one “Legend” production assistant who refused to give her name.

“We’re not responsible for this, but they take it out on us,” she said.

Watching the way members of the community interacted with the P.A.’s on “lockdown” — the production people who block off foot and motor traffic — it was clear that some were a bit hostile.

At one point a man had a 5-minute argument with one young female P.A. about why he had to cross the street on the opposite side and then recross the opposite way to get to the corner he needed.

Look, I know it’s wrong but it feels good to kick the dog every once in a while . . .

See also: All I Have To Say Is This Will Smith Vehicle Better Be Fucking Brilliant; “Big Willie Style” — Read: Two-Story Luxury Trailer.

Your Poor Mother . . .

You know what they say about not quitting the day job . . . this guy actually did it:

Four folks in the group are a self-defined entity, calling themselves the Mortal Beasts and Deities. Hailing from northwestern Connecticut (Falls Village, to be exact), they have made the trek to New York City for three years running, and will stay on their stilts for three hours straight tonight.

“This is an awesome event. We love coming,” says Mark Alexander, who gave up his day job as an art teacher to perform full time. “I want to do this while I still can. It takes balance, rhythm — and lots of ibuprofen.”

Within minutes, the [Greenwich Village Halloween] parade marshals pull back the barricades where Spring St. meets Sixth Ave. The waiting is over. The parade has begun.

Alexander and everyone behind him move eastward, en masse, toward the intersection.

“My mother may be worried about my giving up the day job,” he says. “But look at this spectacle. She can worry all she wants, but I’m certainly not. This is awesome.”

Sometimes I Really Wish That Now-Ubiquitous O’Jays Song Never Happened In The First Place

Highlights from New York Magazine’s Money Issue include but are not limited to:

• Brian, a “subsidized grad student,” spends on an average of almost $2000 a month on shit that is not rent.
• One dollar in New York is only worth about 76 cents in real terms.
• While that security guard makes $1352 a month, you are starting to hate all your old Penn friends.

All Politics Is Disturbingly, Frustratingly Local

As the rest of the country votes on weighty topics like energy policy, stem-cell research and, say, “Bush’s failed war in Iraq,” the key issue in the 13th Congressional District turns out to be . . . a two-way toll:

Three words changed the face of this year’s congressional campaign on Staten Island: Two-way toll.

In August, Democrat Stephen Harrison floated the idea of eliminating the one-way toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for residents of the 13th Congressional District, utilizing a high-speed toll collection system and spreading the levy to both sides of the span for everyone else.

His opponent, Republican Rep. Vito Fossella, pounced hard, deploring the two-way toll of yore that was scuttled through federal legislation in the 1980s to reduce traffic jams. The issue, he says, shows Harrison is out of touch with Island residents.

Harrison, an attorney from Brooklyn, refused to back off, insisting that new technology could cut traffic, pollution and freeloaders traveling in only one direction. He said that Fossella’s portrayal of his two-way toll plan without caveats — he wouldn’t do it without elimination of the toll for district residents, he says — is a distortion.

Bosnia, Iraq And . . . St. George

It boggles the mind to think that no one remembered there was a large mass grave there:

The cars came and went yesterday at the St. George municipal parking lot, where it might have been business as usual were it not for a small group of mostly unnoticed archaeologists unearthing the remains of 19th-century immigrants in one corner of the blacktop.

After digging and patching up parts of the parking lot for months, the team has finally located the spot where an unknown number of dead, most of them thought to be Irish or German immigrants killed by disease, were believed buried in unmarked graves three and four deep in the mid-1800s, before ever getting a crack at life in a new world.

The finding of a concentrated area of undisturbed skeletons is considered crucial to establishing how much of the four-acre parking lot will need to be preserved when the city and state begin construction of a $109 million courthouse there.

The County Clerk’s office on nearby Stuyvesant Place houses most of the borough’s public records, but the parking lot burial ground may offer its own archive: A glimpse into the ill-fated lives of immigrants struck down by typhus and yellow fever and rejected by residents fearful of such devastating diseases.

The small team of archaeologists and the state declined to give details yesterday about how many bones or what kind of skeletons are being unearthed at the lot, in a corner located closest to Hyatt Street and St. Mark’s Place.

Connecticut-based Historical Perspectives is conducting the dig, and a spokeswoman for the State Dormitory Authority said the remains are being treated with the “utmost respect and dignity.”

“They are finding the edges of the burial ground. They are finding human remains,” said Claudia Hutton. “We are not trying to dig up the cemetery, we are trying to determine the edges.”