Up at 7. Spent too long scanning liner notes to Dillanthology and figuring out how to merge them into one pdf. Went to coffee before 8, caught up on daybook (1 day ahead in fact b/c I forgot the date). Dutifully finished The Amateur – ok profile of Thom Gunn. Worked for 2 hrs on intro. Came back, and tried to “write” some of the guitar and keyboard parts I need to overdub on “Untimely Beggar” and “Believe in Ghosts.” Got some ideas, but I’m afraid these will be a phrase-by-phrase slog in the studio. Went back to E77 to write more from about 4-6. Took train w/ Bree to Lincoln Center, saw Thomas Adès’s opera of The Exteriminating Angel at the Met. Balcony seats, not exorbitant for theater, were fine. Excellently performed, visually and dramatically powerful, and probably unwise to encapsulate here: the baseline musical style is fragementary and dissonant, but no more than, I don’t know, Richard Strauss, and not atonal, with a few more “accessible” arias and duets sprinkled throughout. Pop, it ain’t. I have more taste for this than I used to, and the expressionist relationship to the narrative helps (as in the serialist Lulu and that Schoenberg Zietoper that I like. Cool that the composer included an ondes Martenot in the orchestration – the effect wasn’t so different than overdubbing a Theremin on “Our Films, Their Films.” Everyone acts like Bunuel’s film is enigmatic, but if it isn’t about the limits of the bourgeois life and worldview, I don’t know what is. Got home about 11, did a bit of packing, read a chapter or two of the Otis bio (which I’d left behind on the Catskill trip), lights out 1 am.