At one point, K-41 said, his unit passed a compound with several houses that seemed empty, but they noticed the slight movement of a curtain.
We made our way through the darkened streets, navigating down the blocks that seemed emptiest, until we finally found a taxi.
In the production notes for "The Price of Milk," a terminally whimsical contemporary fairy tale set in New Zealand farming country, its director, Harry Sinclair, calls the film "my dream about New Zealand, this make-believe country that seems almost empty of people, where love stories are played out in silence and loneliness".
But this "Cherry Orchard" is otherwise a rather amiable one that emphasizes the fecklessness of its gentrified characters, and spills them, at the end, into a new world order that seems not emptier, just busier in background noise.
At one point in the "Sequenza XI" the guitarist's right hand conducts in the air while the left does a repeating riff on the fingerboard, a moment that seems to mock the empty virtuosity of certain guitar music.
Other works find him playing with a stereotypically West Coast color palette and kitschy imagery that seems to mock the empty consumption that America is known for.
From the Citroën DS to women's magazines, from red wine to children's toys, Barthes peeled back, layer by layer, the meanings of objects that seemed as empty as, well, the Eiffel Tower.
These artists, who may not be represented by their best efforts, create blank zones in the show, walls that seem almost empty relative to what is going on around them.
I recently purchased a house in Los Angeles that seemed awfully empty.
But at a certain point that room just seems empty.
