Slate‘s Seth Stevenson has a riff about Spike Jonze’s “Pardon Our Dust” Gap ad. As noted in this column a while back, there are two versions of this ad — the much cooler Jonze-approved version that never played on TV or anywhere else, and the totally malignant, deballed-by-Gap-marketing-execs version (linked on the Stevenson column page), which uses a musical cut called “Don’t Stand Still” instead of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” a Stanley Kubrick-like scoring that Jonze used. A Gap spokesperson told Stevenson that the company “tried several variations” of the ad, blah, blad. The truth is that The Gap didn’t use Jonze’s version because they thought it was too much on its own wavelength. Translation: it scared them. Truth be told, Jonze’s version doesn’t really deal with, much less convey excitement about, the idea of a forthcoming renovation of the Gap stores. What it does is comically express a fierce loathing of the Gap brand (or, if you go with my impression, of all corporate chain stores everywhere). Stevenson asks, “Did Gap not see the possibilities [in using the Jonze ad]? Were they too scared to go for broke?” The answer is that certain Gap execs saw exactly what Jonze’s spot was about and did what was necessary to eliminate the subversive element…simple.