“It’s amicable. I have no bad feelings towards him except that it was at the very last minute and that was tough on me and the studio. Actually, it was a fiasco. A week before shooting, I was left with this $2 million set of a newspaper room, dressed and ready to go. I was thinking it was all going to be knocked down unless I could find another actor.” — State of Play director Kevin McDonald talking with the Guardian‘s Amy Raphael about his relations with Brad Pitt, who bailed over script issues, as well as the intense script compression that involved translating a six-part British miniseries into a two-hour feature. .

I drove down to Long Beach Island early yesterday evening with my brother Tony. The plan is to do a Big Lebowski later this morning with my sister Laura’s ashes, which Tony has been holding since her death last March. Tony has persuaded me that Laura would have preferred to be scattered under the shadow of the Barnegat Lighthouse (which she came to love as a result of our family’s frequent summer vacations in Beach Haven and Shipbottom) than in my parents’ cemetery plot in Wilton, Connecticut.

A problem happened on the way down with the Dollar rental car I’m driving. Within minutes of leaving the car lot I could feel something wrong with the left-front tire — a misaligned or unbalanced vibration of some kind. It got really bad (and particularly noisy) on the Garden State Parkway. We pulled over in Asbury Park with the idea of taking the tire off and then putting it back on with re-tightened lug bolts, but there was no lug wrench in the trunk. So we limped down to L.B.I. and called AAA for roadside assistance this morning.

The guy said there’s definitely something wrong with the wheel bearing or the motor mount, but that the wheel won’t fall off if we drive back to Manhattan.

Ondi Timoner‘s We Live in Public will be closing the “New Directors, New Films” series early this evening at the Museum of Modern Art. I met with her a little more than a week ago. I decided to wait for tonight’s screening (rather than request a screener) to see it again. I saw it in a Sundance screening booth the first time. Now I want to feel how it plays with a crowd.

We Live in Public, which is easily one of the most thought-provoking docs I’ve seen (as well as the most disturbing), is about ’90s internet pioneer and onetime dto.com milionaire Josh Harris. Timoner documented Harris’s life for more than a decade “to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives,” as one synopsis reads.

My attraction/fascination with We Live in Public is based on the fact that my life as an 24/7 internet columnist is necessarily obsessive and all-consuming, and that Harris’s experience is somehow reflective of my own. I’m an extreme case, but I suspect that everyone with a computer and/or a smart phone is succumbing to the virtual world as well — and at the same time losing touch with the semi-natural/organic life that we all knew before digital seeped in.