That ten minutes of in the middle of nowhere halfway through North By Northwest is one of my favorite scenes in a movie ever. Not sure why. I know exactly where it was shot, too, I mean exactly. Beyond Bakersfield a stretch, not far but a world away full of nothing but space and silence. I live surrounded by old movies here in Silver Lake, they filmed hundreds within just a mile or three of my pad. But a jillion things have happened since, a big crazy city full of big crazy Brownian motion all the time year after year after year. Nothing is as it was. But the fields surrounding Cary Grant in 1959 are still there, just fields, the horizon geometrically perfect and bare, the air still and hot, and distant cars spawning dust devils that swirl and spin and disappear as if nothing between then and now happened, nothing at all.