Influential Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni listens to the sounds of Manhattan waking up in the morning. "The sheets of metal. A short clatter, like gunfire. A train passes, perhaps the elevated. A peal, prolonged, and then the siren, abrupt. Gone. The sounds change in a moment, they arise and die again immediately. The hum reasserts itself, advancing like a camouflaged army, approaches, closes in, on the alert, ready to take over completely." The hum reasserts. I hear that one all the time as traffic ebbs and flows outside our apartment.
