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Metadata » Aleister Crowley » Libers » Liber V vel Reguli
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Aleister Crowley » Libers » Liber V vel Reguli
Liber V vel Reguli
Publication in Class D.
[The title is Latin and means Book 5 or Book of the Prince. Regulus is also the name of the star which marks the beginning or 0° of the constellation Leo.]
The Oath of the Enchantment, which is called the Elevenfold Seal.
The Animadversion towards the Æon.
- Let the Magician, robed and armed as he may deem to be fit, turn to face towards Boleskine,1) that is the House of the Beast 666.
- Let him strike the battery 1–3–3–3–1.
- Let him put the Thumb of his right hand between its index and medius, and make the gestures hereafter following.
The Vertical Component of the Enchantment.
- Let him describe a circle about his head, crying NUIT!
- Let him draw the Thumb vertically downward, and touch the muladhara cakra, crying HADIT!
- Let him, retracing the line, touch the centre of his breast, and cry RA-HOOR-KHUIT!
The Horizontal Component of the Enchantment.
- Let him touch the Centre of his Forehead, his mouth, and his larynx, crying AIWAZ!
- Let him draw his Thumb from right to left across his face at the level of the nostrils.
- Let him touch the Centre of his Breast, and his Solar Plexus, crying THERION!
- Let him draw his Thumb from left to right across his breast at the level of the sternum.
- Let him touch the svadhisthana. and the muladhara cakra, crying BABALON!
- Let him draw his Thumb from right to left across his abdomen, at the level of the hips.
(Thus shall he formulate the Sigil of the Grand Hierophant, but dependent from the Circle.)
The Asserveration of the Spells.
- Let the Magician clasp his hands upon his Wand, his fingers and thumbs interlaced, crying LAShTAL! ΘΕΛΗΜΑ! ϜΙΑΟϜ! ΑΓΑΠΗ! ΑΥΜΓΝ!1
(Thus shall be declared the Words of Power whereby the Energies of the Æon of Horus work his Will in the world.)
The Proclamation of the Accomplishment
- Let the Magician strike the Battery: 3–5–3, crying ABRAHADABRA.
The Enchantment.
1. Let the Magician, still facing Boleskine, advance to the circumference of his Circle.
2. Let him turn himself towards the left, and pace with the stealth and swiftness of a tiger the precincts of his circle, until he complete one revolution thereof.
3. Let him give the sign of Horus (or the Enterer) as he passeth, so to project the Force that radiateth from Boleskine before him.
4. Let him pace his Path until he comes to the North; there let him halt, and turn his face to the North.
5. Let him trace with his Wand the Averse Pentagram proper to invoke Air (Aquarius).
6. Let him bring the Wand to the Centre of the Pentagram and call upon NUIT!
7. Let him make the sign called Puella, standing with his feet together, head bowed, his left hand shielding the muladhara cakra, and his right hand shielding his breast (attitude of the Venus de Medici).
8. Let him turn again to the Left, and pursue his Path as before, projecting the Force from Boleskine as he passeth; let him halt when he next cometh to the South, and face outward.
9. Let him trace the Averse Pentagram that invoketh Fire (Leo).
10. Let him point his Wand to the Centre of the Pentagram, and cry HADIT!
11. Let him give the sign Puer, standing with feet together and head erect. Let his right hand (the thumb extended at right angles to the fingers) be raised, the forearm vertical at a right angle with the upper arm, which is horizontally extended in the line joining the shoulders. Let his left hand, the thumb extended forwards, and the fingers clenched, rest at the junction of the thighs (attitudes of the gods Mentu, Khem, etc.).
12. Let him proceed as before; then in the East, let mim make the Averse Pentagram that invoketh Earth (Taurus).
13. Let him point his Wand to the Centre of the Pentagram, and cry THERION!
14. Let him give the sign called Vir, the feet being together. The hands, with clenched fingers and thumbs thrust out forwards, are held to the temples; the head is then bowed and pushed out, as if to symbolize the butting of an horned beast (attitude of Pan, Bacchus, etc.). (Frontispiece, Equinox I(3)).
15. Proceeding as before, let him make in the West the Averse Pentagram whereby Water is invoked.
16. Pointing the Wand to the Centre of the Pentagram, let him call upon BABALON!
17. Let him give the sign Mulier. The feet are widely separated, and the arms raised so as to suggest a crescent. The head is thrown back (attitude of Baphomet, Isis in Welcome, the Microcosm of Vitruvius). (See Book 4, Part II).
18. Let him break into the dance, tracing a centripetal spiral widdershins, enriched by revolutions upon his axis as he passeth each Quarter, until he come to the centre of the Circle. There let him halt, facing Boleskine.
19. Let him raise the Wand, trace the Mark of the Beast, and cry AIWAZ!
20. Let him trace the Invoking Hexagram of The Beast.
21. Let him lower the Wand, striking the Earth therewith.
22. Let him give the sign of Mater Triumphans. (The feet are together; the left arm is curved as if it supported a child; the thumb and index finger of the right hand pinch the nipple of the left breast, as if offering it to that child.) Let him utter the word ΘΕΛΗΜΑ!2
23. Perform the Spiral Dance, moving deosil and whirling widdershins.
Each time on passing the West extend the Wand to the Quarter in question, and bow:
"Before me the powers of LA!" (to West.)
"Behind me the powers of AL!" (to East.)
"On my right hand the powers of LA!" (to North.)
"On my left hand the powers of AL!" (to South.)
"Above me the powers of ShT!" (leaping in the air.)
"Beneath me the power of ShT!" (striking the ground.)
"Within me the Powers!" (in the attitude of Ptah erect, the feet together, the hands clasped upon the vertical Wand.)
"About me flames my Father's Face, the Star of Force and Fire!"
"And in the Column stands his six-rayed Splendour!"
(This dance may be omitted, and the whole utterance chanted in the attitude of Ptah.)
This is identical with the first gesture.
(Here followeth an impression of the ideas implied in this Pæan)
I also am a Star in Space, unique and self-existent, an individual essence incorruptible; I also am one Soul; I am identical with All and None. I am in All and all in me; I am, apart from all and lord of all, and one with all.
I am God, I very God of very God; I go upon my way to work my Will; I have made Matter and Motion for my mirror; I have decreed for my delight that Nothingness should figure itself as twain, that I might dream a dance of names and natures, and enjoy the substance of simplicity by watching the wanderings of my shadows. I am not that which is not; I know not that which knows not; I love not that which loves not. For I am Love, whereby division dies in delight; I am Knowledge, whereby all parts, plunged in the whole, perish and pass into perfection; and I am that I am, the being wherein Being is lost in Nothing, nor designs to be but its Will to unfold its nature, its need to express its perfection in all possibilities, each phase a partial phantasm, and yet inevitable and absolute.
I am Omniscient, for naught exists for me unless I know it. I am Omnipotents, for naught occurs save by Necessity, my soul's expression through my Will to be, to do, to suffer the symbols of itself. I am Omnipresent, for naught exists where I am not, who fashioned Space as a condition of my consciousness of myself, who am the centre of all, and my circumference the frame of mine own fancy.
I am the All, for all that exists for me is a necessary expression in thought of some tendency of my nature, and all my thoughts are only the letters of my Name.
I am the One, for all that I am is not the absolute All, and all my all is mine and not another's; mine, who conceive of others like myself in essence and truth, yet unlike in expression and illusion.
I am the None, for all that I am is the imperfect image of the perfect; each partial phantom must perish in the clasp of its counterpart, each form fulfil itself by finding its equated opposite, and satisfying its need to be the Absolute by the attainment of annihilation.
The World LAShTAL includes all this.
L is "Justice," the Kteis fulfilled by the Phallus, "Naught and Two" because the plus and the minus have united in "love under will."
A is "The Fool," Naught in Thought (Parzival), Word (Harpocrates), and Action (Bacchus). He is the boundless air, and the wandering Ghost, but with "possibilities." He is the Naught that the Two have made by "love under will."
LA thus represents the Ecstasy of Nuit and Hadit conjoined, lost in love, and making themselves Naught thereby. Their child is begotten and conceived, but is in the phase of Naught also, as yet. LA is thus the Universe in that phase, with its potentialities of manifestation.
AL, on the contrary, though it is essentially identical with LA, shows "The Fool" manifested through the Equilibrium of Contraries. The weight is still nothing, but it is expressed as it were two equal weights in opposite scales. The indicator still points to zero.
ShT is equally 31 with LA and AL, but it expresses the secret nature which operates the Magick or the transmutations.
ShT is the formula of this particular Æon; another æon might have another way of saying 31.
Sh is Fire as T is Force; conjoined they express Ra-Hoor-Khuit.
"The Angel"3 represents the Stèle 666, showing the Gods of the Æon, while "Strength" is a picture of Babalon and the Beast, the earthly emissaries of those Gods.
ShT is the dynamic equivalent of LA and AL. Sh shows the Word of the Law, being triple, as 93 is thrice 31. T shows the formula of Magic declared in that Word; the Lion, the Serpent, the Sun, Courage and Sexual Love are all indicated by the card.
In LA note that Saturn or Satan is exalted in the House of Venus or Astarté and it is an airy sign. Thus L is Father-Mother, Two and Naught, and the Spirit (Holy Ghost) of their Love is also Naught. Love is AHBH, 13, which is AChD. Unity, 1, aleph. who is "The Fool" who is Naught, but none the less an individual One, who (as such) is not another, yet unconscious of himself until his Oneness expresses itself as a duality.
Any impression or idea is unknowable in itself. It can mean nothing until brought into relation with other things. The first step is to distinguish one thought from another; this is the condition of recognizing it. To define it, we must perceive its orientation to all our other ideas. The extent of our knowledge of any one thing varies therefore with the number of ideas with which we can compare it. Every new fact not only adds itself to our universe, but increases the value of what we already possess.
In AL this "The" or "God" arranges for "Countenance to behold countenance,"4 by establishing itself as an equilibrium, A the One-Naught conceived as L the Two-Naught. This L is the Son-Daughter Horus-Harpocrates just as the other L was the Father-Mother Set-Isis. Here then is Tetragrammaton once more, but expressed in identical equations in which every term is perfect in itself as a mode of Naught.
ShT supplies the last element; making the Word of either five or six letters, according as we regard ShT as one letter or two. Thus the Word affirms the Great Work accomplished: 5○=6□.
ShT is moreover a necessary resolution of the apparent opposition of LA and AL; for one could hardly pass to the other without the catalytic action of a third identical expression whose function should be to transmute them. Such a term must be in itself a mode of Naught, and its nature cannot encroach on the perfections of Not-Being, LA, or of Being, AL. It must be purely Nothing-Motion as they are purely Nothing-Matter, so as to create a Matter-in-Motion which is a function of "Something."
Thus ShT is Motion in its double phase, an inertia compose of two opposite current, and each current is also thus polarized. Sh is Heaven and Earth, T Male and Female; ShT is Spirit and Matter; one is the word of Liberty and Love flashing its Light to restore Life to Earth, the other is the act by which Life claims that Love is Light and Liberty. And these are Two-in-One, the divine letter of Silence-in-Speech whose symbol is the Sun in the Arms of the Moon.5
But Sh and T are alike formulæ of force in action as opposed to entities; they are not states of existence, but modes of motion. They are verbs, not nouns.
Sh is the Holy Spirit as a "tongue of fire" manifest in triplicity, and is the child of Set-Isis as their logos or Word uttered by their "Angel." The card is XX, and 20 is the value of yod (the secret seed of all things, the Virgin, "The Hermit," Mercury, the Angel or Herald) expressed in full as IVD. Sh is the spiritual congress of Heaven and Earth.
But T is the Holy Spirit in action as a "roaring Lion" or as "the old Serpent" instead of an "Angel of Light." The twins of Set-Isis, harlot and beast, are busy with that sodomitic and incestuous lust which is the traditional formula for producing demi-gods, as in the cases of Mary and the Dove, Leda and the Swan, etc. The card is XI, the number of Magick AVD: aleph "The Fool" impregnating the woman according to the Word of yod, the Angel of the Lord! His sister has seduced her brother Beast, shaming the Sun with her sin; she has mastered the Lion, and enchanted the Serpent. Nature is outraged by Magick; man is bestialized and woman defiled. The conjunction produces a monster; it affirms regression of types. Instead of a man-God conceived of the Spirit of God by a virgin in innocence, we are asked to adore the bastard of a whore and a brute, begotten in shamefullest sin and born in most blasphemous bliss.
This is in fact the formula of our Magick; we insist that all acts must be equal; that existence asserts the right to exist; that unless evil is a mere term expressing some relation of haphazard hostility between forces equally self-justified, the universe is as inexplicable and impossible as uncompensated action; that the orgies of Bacchus and Pan are no less sacramental than the Masses of Jesus; that the scars of syphilis are sacred and worthy of honour as much as the wounds of the martyrs of Mary.
It should be unnecessary to insist that the above ideas apply only to the Absolute. Toothache is still painful, and deceit degrading, to a man, relatively to his situation in the world of illusion; he does his Will by avoiding them. But the existence of "Evil" is fatal to philosophy so long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions; and to accustom the mind to "make no difference" between any two ideas6 as such is to emancipate it from the thralldom of terror.
We affirm on our altars our faith in ourself and our wills, our love of all aspects of the Absolute All.
And we make the Spirit shin combine with the Flesh teth in a single letter, whose value is 31 even as those of LA the Naught, and AL the All, to complete their Not-Being and Being with its Becoming, to mediate between identical extremes as their mean—the secret that sunders and seals them.
It declares that all somethings are equally shadows of Nothing, and justifies Nothing in its futile folly of pretending that something is stable, by making us aware of a method of Magick through the practice of which we may partake in the pleasure of the process.
The Magician should devise for himself a definite technique for destroying "evil." The essence of such a practice will consist in training the mind and the body to confront things which case fear, pain, disgust,2 shame and the like. He must learn to endure them, then to become indifferent to them, then to become indifferent to them, then to analyze them until they give pleasure and instruction, and finally to appreciate them for their own sake, as aspects of Truth. When this has been done, he should abandon them, if they are really harmful in relation to health and comfort. Also, our selection of "evils" is limited to those that cannot damage us irreparable. E.g., one ought to practice smelling assafœtida until one likes it; but not arsine or hydrocyanic acid. Again, one might have a liaison with an ugly old woman until one beheld and loved the star which she is; it would be too dangerous to overcome the distaste for dishonesty by forcing oneself to pick pockets. Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they should be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.
Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one's neighbour is superior to oneself. It is admirable only for its power to develop certain moral and mental qualities in primitive types, to prevent the atrophy of such faculties as our own vigilance, and for the interest which it adds to the "tragedy, Man."
Crime, folly, sickness and all such phenomena must be contemplated with complete freedom from fear, aversion, or shame. Otherwise we shall fail to see accurately, and interpret intelligently; in which case we shall be unable to outwit and outfight them. Anatomists and physiologists, grappling in the dark with death, have won hygiene, surgery, prophylaxis and the rest for mankind. Anthropologists, archæologists, physicists and other men of science, risking thumbscrews, stake, infamy and ostracism, have torn the spider-snare of superstition to shreds and broken in pieces the monstrous idol of Morality, the murderous Moloch which has made mankind its meat throughout history. Each fragment of that coprolite it manifest as an image of some brute lust, some torpid dullness, some ignorant instinct, or some furtive fear shapen in his own savage mind.
Man is indeed not wholly freed, even now. He is still trampled under the hoofs of the stampeding mules that nightmare bore to his wild ass, his creative forces that he had not mastered, the sterile ghosts that he called gods. Their mystery cows men still; they fear, they flinch, they dare not face the phantoms. Still, too, the fallen fetich seems awful; it is frightful to them that there is no longer an idol to adore with anthems, and to appease with the flesh of their firstborn. Each scrambles in the bloody mire of the floor to snatch some scrap for a relic, that he may bow down to it and serve it.
So, even today, a mass of maggots swarm heaving over the carrion earth, a brotherhood bound by blind greed for rottenness. Science still hesitates to raise the Temple of Rimmon, though every year finds more of her sons impatient of Naaman's prudence. The Privy Council of the Kingdom of Mansoul sits in permanent secret session; it dares not declare what must follow its deed in shattering the monarch Morality into scraps of crumbling conglomerate of of climatic, tribal, and person prejudices, corrupted yet more by the action of crafty ambition, insane impulse, ignorant arrogance, superstitious hysteria, fear fashioning falsehoods on the stone that it sets on the grave of Truth whom it has murdered and buried in the black earth Oblivion. Moral philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, mental pathology, physiology, and many another of the children of Wisdom, of whom she is justified, well know that the laws of Ethics are a chaos of confused conventions, based at best on customs convenient in certain conditions, more often on the craft or caprice of the biggest, the most savage, heartless, cunning and blood-thirsty brutes of the pack, to secure their power or pander to their pleasure in cruelty. There is no principle, even a false one, to give coherence to the clamour of ethical propositions. Yet the very men that have smashed Moloch, and strewn the earth with shapeless rubble, grow pale when they so much as whisper among themselves: "While Moloch ruled all men were bound by one law, and by the oracles of them that, knowing the fraud, feared not, but were his priests and wardens of his mystery. What now? How can any of us, though wise and strong as never was known, prevail on men to act in concert, now that each prays to his own chip of God, and yet knows every other chip to be a worthless ort, dream-dust, ape-dung, tradition-bone, or—what not else?"
So Science begins to see that the Initiates were maybe not merely silly and selfish in making their rule of silence, and in protecting Philosophy from the profane. Yet still she hopes that the mischief may not prove mortal, and begs that things may go on much as usual until that secret session decide on some plan of action.
It has always been fatal when somebody finds out too much too suddenly. If John Huss had cackled more like a hen, he might have survived Michaelmas, and been esteemed for his eggs. The last fifty years have laid the axe of analysis to the root of every axiom; they are triflers who content themselves with lopping the blossoming twigs of our beliefs, or the boughs of our intellectual instruments. We can no longer assert any single proposition, unless we guard ourselves by enumerating countless conditions which must be assumed.
This digression has outstayed its welcome; it was only invited by Wisdom that it might warn Rashness of the dangers that encompass even Sincerity, Energy and Intelligence when they happen not to contribute to Fitness-in-their-environment.
The Magician must be wary in his use of his powers; he must may every act not only accord with his Will, but with the properties of his position at the time. It might be my Will to reach the foot of a cliff; but the easiest way—also the speediest, most direct least obstructed, the way of minimum effort—would be simply to jump. I should have destroyed my Will in the act of fulfilling it, or what I mistook for it; for the True Will has no goal; its nature being To Go. Similarly, a parabola is bound by one law which fixes its relations with two straight lines at every point; yet it has no end short of infinity, and it continually changes its direction. The Initiate who is aware Who he is can always check is conduct by reference to the determinants of his curve, and calculate his past, his future, his bearings, and his proper course at any assigned moment; he can even comprehend himself as a simple idea. He may attain to measure fellow-parabolas, ellipses that cross his path, hyperbolas that span all space with their twin wings. Perhaps he may come at long last, leaping beyond the limits of his own law, to conceive that sublimely stupendous outrage to Reason, the Cone! Utterly inscrutable to him, he is yet well aware that he exists in the nature thereof, that he is necessary thereto, that he is ordered thereby, and that therefrom he is sprung, from the loins of so fearful a Father! His own infinity becomes zero in relation to that of the least fragment of the solid. He hardly exists at all. Trillions multiplies by trillions of trillions of such as he could not cross the frontier even of breadth, the idea which he came to guess at only because he felt himself bound by some mysterious power. Yet breadth is equally a nothing in the presence of the Cone. His first conception must evidently be a frantic spasm, formless, insane, not to be classed as an articulate thought. Yet, if he develops the faculties of his mind, the more he knows of it the more he sees that its nature is identical with his own whenever comparison is possible.
The True Will is thus both determined by its equations, and free because those equation are simply its own name, spelt out fully. His sense of being under bondage comes from his inability to read it; his sense that evil exists to thwart him arises when he begins to learn to read, reads wrong, and is obstinate that his error is an improvement.
We know one thing only. Absolute existence, absolute motion, absolute direction, absolute simultaneity, absolute truth, all such ideas: they have not, and never can have, any real meaning. If a man in delirium tremens fell into the Hudson River, he might remember the proverb and clutch at an imaginary straw. Words such as "truth" are like that straw. Confusion of thought is concealed, and its impotence denied, by the invention. This paragraph opened with "We know": yet, questioned, "we" make haste to deny the possibility of possessing, or even of defining, knowledge. What could be more certain to a parabola-philosopher that he could be approached in two ways, and two only? It would be indeed little less that the whole body of his knowledge, implied in the theory of his definition of himself, and confirmed by every single experience. He could receive impressions only be meeting A, or being caught up by B. Yet he would be wrong in an infinite number of ways. There are therefore Aleph-Zero7 possibilities that at any moment a man may find himself totally transformed. And it may be that our present dazzled bewilderment is due to our recognition of the existence of a new dimension of thought, which seems so "inscrutably infinite" and "absurd" and "immoral," etc.—because we have not studied it long enough to appreciate that its laws are identical with our own, though extended to new conceptions. The discovery of radioactivity created a momentary chaos in chemistry and physics; but it soon led to a fuller interpretation of the old ideas. It dispersed many difficulties, harmonized many discords, and—yea, more! It shewed the substance of Universe as a simplicity of Light and Life, manners to compose atoms, themselves capable of deeper self-realization through fresh complexities and organizations, each with its own peculiar powers and pleasures, each pursuing its path through the world where all things are possible. It revealed the omnipresence of Hadit, identical with Himself, yet fulfilling Himself by dividing His interplay with Nuit into episodes, each form of his energy isolated with each aspect of Her receptivity, delight developing delight continuous from complex to complex. It was the voice of Nature awakening at the dawn of the Æon, as Aiwaz uttered the Word of the Law of Thelema.
So also shall he who invoketh often behold the Formless Fire, with trembling and bewilderment; but if he prolong his meditation, he shall resolve it into coherent and intelligible symbols, and he shall hear the articulate utterance of that Fire, interpret the thunder thereof as a still small voice in his heart. And the Fire shall reveal to his eyes his own image in its own true glory; and it shall speak in his ears the mystery that is his own right Name.
This then in the virtue of the Magick of The Beast 666, and the canon of its proper usage; to destroy the tendency to discriminate between any two things in theory, and in practice to pierce the veils of every sanctuary, pressing forward to embrace every image; for there is none that is not very Isis. The Inmost is one with the Inmost; yet the form of the One is not the form of the other; intimacy exacts fitness. He therefore who liveth by air, let him not be bold to breathe water. But mastery cometh by measure: to him who with labour, courage, and caution giveth his life to understand all that doth encompass him, and to prevail against it, shall be increase. "The word of Sin is Restriction": seek therefore Righteousness, enquiring into Iniquity, and fortify thyself to overcome it.
*: The people of England have made two revolutions to free themselves from Popish fraud and tyranny. They are at their tricks again; and if we have to make a Third Revolution, let us destroy the germ itself!
This ritual was first published in Appendix VI of Magick in Theory and Practice. The text above is taken from the version published in Magick: Book 4 Parts I-IV which corrects a few errors and omissions in the original edition. Two earlier drafts of this ritual, with a measure of audience participation, are also extant.
1: THELEMA, AGAPÉ, and AUMGN in Greek in the original. FIAOF or VIAOV (Hebrew, Vau-Yod-Aleph-Ayin-Yod = 93) is a variation of the formula of IAO discussed by Crowley in Chapter V of Magick in Theory and Practice. AUMGN is an extension of AUM described in Chapter VII of Magick.
2: THELEMA in Greek letters in the original.
3: A name sometimes used for Tarot Trump XX, more usually called "Judgement" or "the Last Judgement." In Crowley's Thoth deck it is called The Æon – T.S.
4: The quote is from the "Sepher Dtznouthia" or "Book of Concealment," a Qabalistic text translated by Mathers from the Latin of Von Rosenroth and published in Kabbalah Unveiled.
5: The double letter ShT is glyphed by writing the Greek equivalents of Shin-Teth, Sigma-Theta, using the variant form of the capital Sigma which looks the the Latin C. The result looks like Crowley's "Sun and Moon conjoined" symbol.
6: The allusion is to AL I. 22, which reads: "Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt."
7: Should probably be read Aleph-Null, written as the Hebrew letter Aleph followed by a zero in subscript. The reference is to the infinite set of cardinal numbers, the smallest infinite set; a set is said to have Aleph-null members if its members can be put into one to one correspondence with the set of natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3, …). On this definition, there are as many signed integers (which includes negative numbers) as natural numbers, and as many rational numbers (i.e., numbers which can be written as fractions, one integer divided by another) as natural numbers. There are, however, more real numbers; the real numbers cannot be put in a one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers, because they cannot be written in order; for whatever ordering principle you use, given any two real numbers it will always be possible to put one in between them. It is still a matter of debate whether there exist any infinite sets between aleph-null and the continuum (the latter being the set of real numbers).
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Nowadays, it's not enough to just have one source of income, especially if you're in the entertainment industry. Every actor must also be a writer, producer, singer, dancer, and whatever else they need to be to earn some money.
Actress Tatyana Ali has always embraced her other talents as a means of income. Back in 1998, at the tender age of 17, Ali dropped her debut album "Kiss the Sky" that boasted the hit song "Daydreamin'" featuring Lord Tariq and a pre-supercreep Peter Gunz.
Tatyana Ali hasn't released music since that album and now 16 years later, she's returning to her musical roots with a new EP called "Hello." In effort to promote the EP, Ali went on "Arsenio" to perform the project's lead single "Wait For It." While the song is a catchy retracing of Donna Summer, Ali's performance wasn't all bad, but it wasn't all good either. In spite of doing the brave thing and actually singing live, she was a tad off key in spots and her breath control could use some work. But don't get us wrong, we love Tatyana Ali. We just think she can do better.
We know she can do better because we've seen her do better on various television shows and movies throughout the eighties and nineties. Check out some of Tatyana Ali's best television performances that were better than her most recent.
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"Why Do Fools Fall In Love" from "Eddie Murphy's Raw" (1987)
In her first film role, Tatyana Ali got to show off her singing abilities as a young Eddie Murphy's sister in the opening sketch segment of Eddie Murphy's classic stand-up comedy special "Raw." Despite the breakout star of the family being Eddie Murphy, his little sister is pictured to have given him a run for his money when it comes to displaying talent.
5 Tatyana Ali Performances Better Than Her "Arsenio" Number was originally published on theurbandaily.com
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As Nate Anderson pointed out earlier today, the book helped do away with the formal oral storytelling tradition that helped sustain many early cultures. The Internet, in turn, is being blamed for the death of the book. Now Google, the One Laptop per Child program, and UNICEF are hoping to use the Internet to bring oral storytelling back to the fore via the Our Stories website.
The site is one of a number of communications-focused works launched by UNIWiki, a group within UNICEF. It's powered by Google Maps, allowing you to find content by geographic location. Once you pick a story, the audio stream is accessed via YouTube, accompanied by a static image of the speakers. So far, the few recordings available come from a Brazilian museum or were recorded by UNICEF volunteers; there are also welcome messages, including one by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Right now, there is no way for anyone not affiliated with the project to upload content, although changing that is clearly a high priority for those involved. They'll take recordings from any source—they specifically mention using cell phones to capture audio—but it's clearly meant to leverage the recording abilities of the OLPC hardware. Those laptops would also allow more of the world to reach the recordings once they begin to appear.
The site promotes interviews as the preferred format for the spoken material, and it encourages the use of the speakers' native language. That said, stories from Ghana, Pakistan, and Tanzania were presented in English, a language that seems likely to make them accessible to a wider audience.
The project as it's structured now has the potential to provide a good window on the broader world for students in nearly any country, and the principals involved are right to focus on getting a functional content acceptance system in place as quickly as possible. Still, it would be good to see hints of an expanded scope. The world is losing languages and cultural stories at a rapid pace largely due to the proliferation of communications technology. It would be nice to see that same technology applied to an effort to preserve them.


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Mapping Elliott Smith's Portland
We map the record stores, streets, and clubs where our city's drizzle seeped into the singer-songwriter's music, with local author William Todd Schultz's new biography, Torment Saint, as our guide.
1. LINCOLN HIGH: For Smith, the transfer from suburban Dallas schools to the comfortable liberalism of Lincoln was a bit of a culture shock, but he soon found friends—and bandmates—in a group of musically inclined gifted-and-talented types. In Lincoln's 1987 yearbook, Smith's "final words" as a senior are Tom Waits's: "Just let me fall out the window with confetti in my hair."
2. DJANGO RECORDS: Smith killed hours flipping through LPs at this High Fidelity–esque, now-closed shop. Django even stocked tapes by Smith's high school band Stranger Than Fiction—and, to the teen's disbelief, actually sold some.
3-6. SATYRICON, X-RAY CAFE, LA LUNA, EJ'S: These grungy, now-shuttered rock clubs formed the circuit for Smith's post-college band, Heatmiser. In Torment Saint, Schultz's sources remember the 1990s Portland scene as a "backwater" where "hookups and drama were commonplace," but where a noncompetitive, anticommercial spirit bred creativity.
7. ALAMEDA: From the street the protagonist of "Alameda" walks down, "shuffling [his] deck of trick cards over everyone," to an intersection near where the man in "Needle in the Hay" is "gonna make it all OK" (SE Sixth & Powell), Portland roads pop up like signposts in Smith's lyrics.
8. ELLIOTT AVENUE: As apocrypha has it, the singer, né Steve, chose his name from this Ladd's Addition thoroughfare. But according to Torment Saint, the pseudonym was in fact a high school girlfriend's nickname for Smith.
Check out a playlist of Elliott Smith songs with Portland references:


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Master of the Met
It is a quintessentially glamorous New York moment. The lights in the huge gold-and-red auditorium begin to dim. The hum from the many-splendored crowd diminishes to an expectant hush. The audience of 3,800 men and women, elegantly attired in a symphony of high fashion, settle in their plush and pricey seats. The musicians, ensconced in their subterranean space before the mammoth stage, finish their fine-tuning and await their maestro. A dozen sparkling crystal chandeliers, hanging low over the gilt-edged arena, begin gently to rise. Limpid satellites lifting to orbit, they ascend slowly and gracefully to their resting places just below the golden ceiling, their glittering glass reflecting a rainbow of light. The time is just after 8 on a warm October evening, but the moment is one repeated 210 times a year. The place is the massively monumental Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, one of the world's best-known opera houses. Sitting in a parterre box in a corner of the darkened music hall as the ornate curtain begins to rise is a 57-year-old man with a narrow black beard, receding hair and a happy yet stern smile. His name is Joseph Volpe, and he is responsible for it all.
This night, Luciano Pavarotti, the most famous tenor of modern times, will fall in love with an icy Chinese princess in Giacomo Puccini's Turandot. But whatever the opera, and whoever the stars--a constellation that includes Plácido Domingo, Cecilia Bartoli, Renée Fleming, Kiri Te Kanawa, Roberto Alagna, Bryn Terfel and all the other great voices of the 1990s--it is Volpe, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, who makes it all happen.
Whether it's wooing donors, signing stars, setting ticket prices, greeting President Clinton on an opening-night visit, working out the details of this year's $160 million operating budget, negotiating labor agreements or keeping the peace among temperamental performers and directors, Volpe is Mr. Met. He works closely with his artistic director, James Levine, planning the seasons and choosing the repertory. Levine initiates the artistic planning, but when it comes to the financial decisions on what will and will not appear on the Met stage, Volpe has the final word. And it is a firm one.
He has been called domineering, notoriously demanding and rough-edged. A profile in The New York Times discussed his screaming fits, described his staff as cowed and noted that even his closest allies found him difficult. But his opera house has also been called the world's busiest and perhaps its greatest--and that greatness these days is in good part attributable to Volpe's skills as a manager.
"I act as a boss and I accept my responsibilities," Volpe says in his strong but pleasant baritone voice, illustrating a directness that a colleague once called "right between the eyes." The words most frequently used to describe him are "tough" and "decisive." Asked once why he had fired a stagehand on Christmas Eve, he said it was because the stagehand was insubordinate. When someone once called him a charmer, he complained, asking the speaker not to ruin his reputation.
But Volpe is also a charmer--a complex and complicated man, and above all an accomplished one. Franco Zeffirelli, the renowned Italian movie and opera director who has worked with Volpe for more than 30 years, has called him "gentle and powerful, loyal, compassionate and often horrendous." Pavarotti, his longtime friend, calls him the "grande capo." Those who work for him have described the experience this way: "He knows the answer to the question before he asks it, and you had better know the answer."
Perhaps most important, Joseph Volpe is a blue-collar among the blue bloods, a former member of the working class who rose to the black-tie, upper-class world that is the New York opera scene. He is a quintessential New Yorker--and his story is a quintessential New York story. Born in Brooklyn in 1940 and raised in Glen Cove, Long Island, he graduated from high school and then decided to spend not one day in college. At age 18, he opened his own auto repair shop. Six years later, in 1964, he joined the Met as an apprentice stagehand--and in 1990 became the first person to rise through the Met's ranks to the No. 1 position in the organization.
In his seven years at the Met's helm, he has pleased audiences, patrons and critics, expanding the company's repertory to include more modern and adventurous works, ridding it of the second-rate singers and conductors who peopled too many productions in the 1980s, attracting and placating the best performers in the world, and maintaining the Met's season-long near-capacity attendance figures. Throughout his reign, the Met has had a labor peace perhaps unprecedented in any arts organization--a peace directly attributable to Volpe's roots. I. Philip Sipser, the Met orchestra's longtime negotiator and lawyer, says Volpe is "the best negotiator in the country I have worked with, the best adversary I have ever had," because "he has a fundamental understanding of the problems of people who work for a living."
"He is completely natural," Sipser says. "He has never lost his common touch. Last night in negotiations, we were arguing and yelling at each other, but when he says something I believe it. Some working people become bosses and turn into bastards. Not Joe."
Volpe also has an understanding of his stars, and will do almost anything to keep them happy. But the emphasis is on the "almost"--he will cater to his singers, but he will not pander to their whims. In 1994, when the renowned soprano Kathleen Battle was being as difficult as a diva can be--not showing up for rehearsals, making impossible demands, and angering and upsetting her fellow performers--Volpe summarily fired her, and made newspaper headlines all over the world. She has not been back, and is not likely to be. Because first and foremost, Volpe is The Boss.
A big and stocky man, The Boss--as a British television documentary about his life dubbed him--is sitting behind his large walnut desk in his office inside and to the left of the Met's main entrance. His trim beard is creating an aura that has more than once been called Mephistophelian. It is an image he likes, one he enjoys cultivating. And wrapped up in that image is his delight in a good cigar.
"It's an all-consuming job," he says, pausing to light a Hoyo de Monterrey robusto, the size he prefers. "Anything smaller I'm not happy with as far as gauge is concerned, and anything longer I'm not happy with because I'm a busy person." This Hoyo is a Dominican cigar, he says. "I don't keep Cuban cigars in the office because when I smoke here I never get to finish them."
His schedule sees to that. "I'm responsible for everything you see or hear that we produce," he continues. "I make all the final decisions. That's what the position of general manager is, if one is crazy enough to accept it. It's the focus of your life. I'm in early in the morning. What I do is go home if I can at some point during the day and then come back for the performance. I'm here four or five nights a week, six days a week. It's necessary to be here. If an artist has a problem on stage, he or she feels better if you're there to help. You have to gear your life around the Met schedule. That's why I live across the street from the opera house. My wife and I have a lovely house up in northeastern Westchester County, but I couldn't commute. It would be impossible. I use the Westchester house to escape, to make it possible for me to continue in my job, to survive this position."
His day is typically busy. "Today we're rehearsing a new production of Rossini's Cenerentola [Cinderella] with Cecilia Bartoli. When there are orchestra rehearsals I try not to schedule meetings. I try to attend as many of the rehearsals as I can so I don't end up going to one of the final ones and saying, 'Wait a minute, I don't particularly like this,' and having to change something at the last minute. I get here around 10 a.m., and normally I don't go out to lunch. I just scheduled a lunch, though, with the lawyer who represents our musicians. We're negotiating a contract renewal. I handle all the major labor negotiations--with the orchestra, the chorus, the performing artists and the stagehands. Then, during the day, there are the meetings. They can be about new productions, the budget, ticket sales versus expenses, how we're doing against our projections. It could be a meeting with our development director about whom I need to meet or whom I should entertain to raise money. It could be a meeting with our marketing people. It's running a business, yet one has to remember it's also a performing arts institution, which makes it more difficult. Somebody said last night they thought being general manager of the Met was the third most difficult job in the country, after the president of the United States and the mayor of New York City."
The mayor of New York, Rudolph W. Giuliani, also a cigar lover, is an opera aficionado and a frequent Met patron. At the start of the season, Volpe had an even more special guest--President Clinton, an opera lover and a sometime cigar aficionado himself, who became the first U.S. chief executive to attend a Met season opening night.
"The president was very cordial, very talkative, very outgoing, very warm," Volpe recalls. "He is a people person. I asked him to come backstage after the performance of Carmen to greet the company, and he wanted to, but he said he would have to check with the Secret Service to make sure it would allow the Met's patrons to exit the garage while he was still in the house. He didn't want everyone to have to be frozen in place until he left. The Secret Service said it was OK, that people could leave, so he went backstage. The cast of Carmen has many children, and they all surrounded him, put their arms around him. He didn't want to leave."
Volpe and the president didn't get a chance to talk about cigars. "Maybe next time," Volpe says.
Playing host to guests in his box, whether they're President and Mrs. Clinton, Met donors or the glamorous celebrity du soir, Volpe exhibits the charm and conviviality that are an essential part of any position that involves fund-raising. He approaches the task with an obvious enthusiasm and with his trademark high energy. He awes his visitors with a backstage tour between acts, taking them behind the closed curtain for a walk on the elaborate Turandot set as 30 or more stagehands make the necessary changes for the next scene. Escorting his guests at intermission for a dessert-and-coffee buffet in his office, he puts them at ease with just the right anecdote, often a self-effacing one. Pointing to a caricature of himself in opera costume framed on the wall, he laughs. "They did that for a profile of me in Connoisseur magazine," he says. "It was the last issue. They put me in the magazine, and it folded."
Two nights later, for the premiere of La Cenerentola--the first time the opera has ever been performed at the Met--the parterre lobby is a sea of black ties and black dresses, Met donors and their equally social friends attending a benefit for the Metropolitan Opera Guild. The diamonds, sapphires and pearls dangling from the necks of the female guests rival the chandeliers in sparkle. At intermission, the pink champagne flows, and an affable Volpe makes the rounds, shaking hand after hand, posing for photos, soliciting a patron's opinion of Bartoli and the new production, his right arm invariably around one shoulder or another. "I have to work the crowd," he says.
After the performance and a standing ovation for the performers, several hundred of the Met's best friends gather for a formal cast supper on the Grand Tier at tables bedecked with crystal-vase bouquets of multicolored roses, hydrangeas and dahlias, beneath the opera house's stunning Chagall murals. Champagne again, and a meal of quail, pasta with pheasant and morels, and pear tart à la mode. Volpe is a study in perpetual motion, flowing from table to table, making certain everyone gets at least a hello. The production has been an obvious success with the audience, but Volpe readily admits he had his doubts. "When the curtain went up," he says, "I asked myself again if I had made a mistake by putting this show in this auditorium." The comic opera is a small one, he says, and needs immediate audience contact, which can be difficult to get in the Met's vast space. "But it got it," he says. "It worked."
It is long after midnight, but there is still work to be done. Volpe heads to the podium to introduce the cast members, with a few appropriate words of praise for each. Then he moves on, to the next table, the next group. It all looks easy, but it is most definitely not. "At the end of the night I'm exhausted," Volpe acknowledges with a smile.
It is another night, another Turandot. The lights are dimming, the chandeliers making their way to the ceiling. The general manager's box in the corner is almost fully occupied--seated in it are a couple of major Met donors; Volpe's wife, Jean Anderson Volpe, a former ballet dancer; and the supermodel Christy Turlington, now also a student at New York University. Turlington had been a guest at this season's opening and loved the performance, so Volpe invited her back. In the box next door is Beverly Sills, chairman of Lincoln Center. But surprisingly, one person is missing: Volpe. He is almost always present to entertain his guests in the jovial and low-key way he has perfected, but so far this evening the job has fallen to his wife--who performs the duty with equal grace.
Suddenly, just before Levine appears in the orchestra pit, the box door opens and Volpe enters. "Luciano is not feeling well," he says urgently. "It's a bit of catarrh. He's lost the top of his voice. At first he said he didn't know if he could go on. But he'll go on, and without an announcement. We'll get through Act One."
He pauses to explain. "Often if singers aren't feeling well I go out and make an announcement and say they are sick and ask for the audience's understanding," he says. "But Luciano's position is he comes here to sing, not to make excuses, and if he has to make excuses he shouldn't be singing."
Pavarotti does go on, and performs well, if not at his best. The moment the curtain falls after acts one and two, Volpe is up and out of his box to go backstage and check on his star. After the performance, an obviously tired and unwell Pavarotti, removing his makeup in his dressing room, laments that his singing was not up to his usual standards. Volpe and Levine, right by his side, assure him that he was, as always, transcendent. Pavarotti sighs. "Its a very demanding role," he says.
For Volpe, dealing on a daily basis with his tenors, sopranos, baritones, basses and mezzos is a major part of the job. Opera singers do not have reputations as being the easiest folk to get along with. But, Volpe says, with a few exceptions, he has not found his great performers to be difficult--as long as you know what to expect.
"Before the opening night of Turandot, I was meeting with a conductor and I got a phone call from Luciano," Volpe recalls. "'It's a disaster,' Luciano said. I asked if he was OK. 'Oh, of course,' he said. 'I'm fine. I just need 10 more pair of tickets for tonight. And it's sold out.' So all day yesterday, he was worried about his friends, not himself. And of course anytime Luciano or Plácido or another major star is singing, I always put some tickets aside for moments like those. So it's not difficult if you expect it. And really, those guys are no trouble at all. There's no carrying on, there are no antics. They are who they are. They're here to do their work, and that's what they do."
To further make his point, Volpe gives an example of the kind of performer Pavarotti is. Several years ago, the tenor was to sing in I Lombardi, and just as with that one performance of Turandot, Pavarotti came in with a bad cold and wasn't sure he could go on. But he went on--without an announcement.
"Well," Volpe says, "that same night the soprano had incredible problems with her voice. She had cracked several notes, and after Act Two she wanted to go home. So Luciano went to talk with her and told her that if she left the theater, she might never be able get herself to come back. He took her into his dressing room and they went through the next act. He told her they would get through it, and he got her through it. He put whatever problems he had that night aside to help someone else."
Most singers are like Pavarotti, Volpe says: they come to work and are all business. "But if they have a lack of confidence or are insecure, they are going to do some things you normally would not expect, like throw a chair or scream at someone." He laughs. "I do that all the time, and I'm not insecure at all," he says.
"But seriously, there are a handful of singers who are difficult just to be difficult." He pauses and smiles his devilish smile. "One of them used to work here, you know."
That was Kathleen Battle. Battle was at the Met in February 1994 to give five performances of Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment). She had sung at the Met before and had caused problems, though not major ones. But for the Donizetti, the troubles began immediately. Newspapers reported that she had the rehearsal schedule changed at her whim, arrived late, left early, or didn't arrive at all. She instructed the bass baritone not to look at her when she sang--nor was he to touch her. During rehearsals she forbade people to look at her and accused them of staring into her mouth. She told the conductor how to conduct. In one scene, the mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias was supposed to play the piano while Battle sang; Battle refused to sing if Elias played any portion of the music.
The complaints began reaching Volpe's desk almost from the start. Nothing he or anyone could do would get her to change. Finally, he dismissed her. In his press release announcing herdismissal, he was characteristically tough, direct and no-nonsense: he said that her "unprofessional actions" were "profoundly detrimental" to the company. When the cast of the Donizetti opera heard she had been fired, they applauded.
Looking back more than three years later, Volpe says he is still "definitely" confident he made the correct move. "It was the right decision," he says, "because I said to her at the time that we would let a few months pass and we should talk about it. Kathy Battle has over the years had great difficulty working with her colleagues. Obviously there are some problems. I don't know what they are. I'm a general manager, not a psychiatrist. But I don't think anything has changed. I told her we could talk in a few months because I thought maybe I could help her. But I've never had the opportunity. I spoke to her agent, and he said if I wanted to talk to her I should call her. He didn't want to get involved. But she's not going to come back to the Met. If it's not possible to have a phone conversation, you can't work together. And I have not since that attempt gone out of my way to try to patch it up. She's no Maria Callas, you know. I mean, who does she think she is? We get along fine without her, and she gets along fine without the Met, I guess. But I think it's a shame in a way because I always pride myself on being able to help and support singers."
Nonetheless, he says, if she did call he would take her call. "Of course I would," he says. "I never say never. Because things in life change. I have no problem with that at all."
One person with whom he says he has never had a falling out is James Levine, his artistic director and principal conductor. Despite the normal tensions between the financial and the artistic sides of any arts organization, he says his relations with Levine, whom he has known for 27 years, are excellent. "Jim and I have been working together for as long as he's been here," Volpe says. "What normally happens is that everything is a collaboration. Every artistic decision is a financial one, and every financial decision is an artistic one. It's all intertwined. But anything he does requires my approval, and if there is a disagreement and I believe my position is correct I will make that decision. And Jimmy doesn't have a problem with that."
Levine, Volpe says, rarely if ever gets angry; Volpe is different. But he says that his occasional tantrums are not what they appear; they are part of his image, his very calculated persona. "I never lose my temper," he says. "Let me explain. Not long after I started working at the Met, we were doing a scene change and we didn't do it in time. But I remained calm. I said, 'OK, we'll do it next time.' But a member of management came by all excited and said that because I wasn't upset I must not care. So I said to myself, see, you have to get upset about things so people understand you care. So the next time something went wrong I got upset, and everyone was happy--Volpe's got things under control.
"At labor negotiations, for example, I can whoop and holler and scream and carry on like a wild man. I'll shout that they can burn the place down but I'm never going to give in. And I'll walk out. And their attorney will come over to me later and tell me it was great--that my act really helped him because until then the union was stuck in its position and he couldn't get them to change."
The Met has long been criticized, in the United States and abroad, for being too conservative, for focusing on the established standards. "The Met is, above all, a house where people come to hear the great voices they love," Volpe says. "But we're really not conservative, at least not anymore. We're expanding the repertoire. We're commissioning new works. It's a way of attracting a more varied audience. But it's also risky, because Aida is going to sell out every performance, and Richard Strauss's Capriccio, one of our two premieres this season, may not."
When it comes to risks, Volpe is a pro--with a lifetime of experience. Taking risks, he says, is part of what got him to where he is. Volpe was born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, but he grew up in Astoria and Bayside, Queens, and then in Glen Cove. His father was the main partner in a men's clothing business. After graduating from high school, and "being the brilliant genius I am," Volpe says sarcastically, "I decided I couldn't waste my time going to college. It would have been four more years before I could get to do what I wanted to do. So I opened my own automobile repair business." His father had wanted him to go to college. "Stubborn son that I was, I did the opposite," he says.
After two years he sold the business and briefly worked with a New Jersey manufacturer of baseball pitching machines. He loved working with his hands, but he also enjoyed the theater. He married a woman whose father was in the Theatrical Stage Employees Local No. 1. He took the union's apprentice test and achieved its highest score. He got a job as a stagehand on Broadway, working on the crew of Gore Vidal's The Best Man, which starred Henry Fonda. Then he decided he wanted to build scenery; a colleague told him the best place to learn was at the Metropolitan Opera. Volpe went to work at the Met in 1964; he has been there ever since.
In 1966, the Met moved from its legendary home at Broadway and 39th Street to a new building at Lincoln Center. For opening night, Franco Zeffirelli was directing the premiere of a new opera, Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber. Volpe was involved in preparing the enormous set. One day, he was on stage removing some of the clouds the designer had prepared for the background; he felt there were simply too many. Zeffirelli came by and asked what Volpe was doing; Volpe said it was his job to make the production fit the stage, and that some "wacko designer" had designed too much scenery. The director quickly left. The next day, Volpe's boss, Rudolph Bing, perhaps the most famous general manager in Met history, formally introduced the stagehand to Zeffirelli. "This is the designer you accused of being wacko," Bing said to Volpe. Apparently there were no hard feelings, for when the Met's master carpenter resigned a week later, Bing gave Volpe the job.
Twelve years later, Volpe jumped from labor to management, becoming the Met's technical director, in charge of all shop and stage operations. In 1981 he was put in charge of labor relations and named the opera house's assistant manager, responsible for all its everyday operations.
When the general manager, Bruce Crawford, left in 1989, Volpe became the leading candidate for the top job. But, perhaps because the Met's board members were uncomfortable with giving a former working stiff their No. 1 position, he didn't get it. Some board members at the time, Volpe says, considered him "almost a ruffian." The position went to Hugh Southern, then acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Southern lasted eight months. The board then turned to Volpe, but, perhaps still unsure he was enough of a "gentleman," made him not general manager but general director, with somewhat less authority. Within two years, however, he more than proved himself, and the word "director" was changed to "manager," with the power to match that of Bing, his first mentor.
Volpe has reigned over an era of unprecedented financial stability at the Met, with attendance during the 1996-97 season at 92 percent of capacity. Among Volpe's many accomplishments are the successful introduction of "Met Titles," simultaneous translations flashed on seat backs that are available for anyone who wants them but that do not interfere with the enjoyment of those purists who despise them.
Volpe admits that when he began working at the Met, he didn't know anything about opera. "But I learned rather quickly," he says. "People say I'm not a musician, but Rudolph Bing wasn't a musician, either. If you've been listening and you've been working in a place for 33 years, you have to learn something about opera."
But does he love opera? He has in the past admitted to a fondness for Puccini, but the question runs deeper. "I keep thinking about whether when I retire from the opera I will come often or at all," he says. "And I think the answer is yes, I will come. I love the art form, and I love a great performance. I love music. And I love opera when it's done at a very high level."
How many nights a week, then, does he love opera at the Met? "Actually, this season quite a bit," he says. "I'm proud to say that I've loved what we've done so far. I think overall our level at the Met is higher than anywhere else. But what happens when you give 210 performances a year, seven performances a week, is that you're going to have performances where you couldn't get the singers you wanted, or people become ill and there are last-minute changes. So there will be those performances that are not at the highest level. And those are painful."
Volpe makes a clear distinction between the good and the not-so-good. "After a good performance I go backstage and offer my congratulations," he says. "After a mediocre performance I don't go backstage. I can't go back and say how wonderful it was when it wasn't."
Whether or not he loves opera, he certainly loves cigars. He began smoking them about 10 years ago, he says, and there was an instant ardor. "One of our tenors, Frank Lopardo, came over to me after a performance," Volpe recalls. "He told me he was going to give me a cigar because it would be good for my hypertension. He said I would have to sit still for 45 minutes and try it. He gave me two Macanudos, and they were interesting. And of course what happens is that I'm a screwball, and when I do anything I get very serious about it, very passionate. So I started collecting cigars--Cuban cigars in particular. I guess it's a decent-sized collection. The thing is, I keep smoking them."
He also gives them away. Wolfgang Schmidt, a German tenor, is arriving in the next few days to sing Tannhauser. "Schmidt smokes cigars," Volpe says. "I want to give him a few to get things off to a good start."
Volpe's favorite cigars are Cohibas--"of course"--but he also loves the Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No. 2. "It's a great cigar," he says. "I'll also smoke some torpedos, especially Bolivars. I'm not a big fan of the Montecristo No. 2. I've always liked the La Gloria Cubana Wavell. And I've just bought a box of Bauzá robustos. It's a good cigar." Among his other favorites are Cohiba Esplendidos, Hoyo de Monterrey Churchills and double coronas, and Romeo y Julietas.
He smokes three or four cigars a day. "I get up early in the morning, no matter what time I get to sleep," he says. "For example, when we opened Turandot with Luciano, there was a party afterward. So we rolled in at 2 or 2:30 a.m. But I was up at 7. I had a cup of coffee, I read the newspaper and I had a cigar. Then, depending on my schedule, I might have another cigar in the office before I go home. What I try to do is to go home at about 5 or 6 o'clock--I live just across the street from the opera house--and have another cigar. Then I'm back in the theater for the performance, and afterward I'll have another cigar. And every once in a while I'll throw in yet another for good measure."
Volpe's passion for cigars does not abate during performance hours. One of his guests for Turandot is George Vasquez of the well-known De La Concha tobacconist on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, who shows up in Volpe's office after Act One with a gift: a Fuente Fuente OpusX and two Fuente Don Carlos robustos--"the best non-Cuban robustos," Volpe says. After Act Two, Volpe proudly removes a cigar-store catalogue from his desk drawer. It's from Mom's Cigars, on lower Fifth Avenue. "Look at this," he says. "A box of 25 Bauzá robustos for $100. They'll cost you $140 anywhere else. And I know they have them in stock. We get all the cigars we use for Carmen there."
As for the reasons he smokes cigars, they're simple: "It relaxes me," he says. "And I get great enjoyment from it. What's not relaxing, of course, is that there are many people who dislike cigars. When I smoke a cigar in my office, I had better keep my door closed, or else I hear from my staff. But the other side of it is that cigar smokers are very friendly with each other, so you have this relationship, this camaraderie that develops. Some of our donors, for example, smoke cigars. We have this group called the Golden Horseshoe. If you give $150,000 [within three years] to the Metropolitan Opera, you become a member of the Golden Horseshoe. Every year we have a dinner for them on the Grand Tier, and some members and I will start talking about cigars. They'll come over and say, 'Joe, try one of these.' And it will always be good."
Volpe met his wife, Jean, at the Met, where she was a dancer. They were married in 1989 and have a daughter, Anna, 6--"It's pronounced like Anna Magnani, the Italian actress," he says. He has seven other children from two previous marriages. His oldest is in his mid-30s--"Michael Joseph Volpe, a lawyer, named for my father."
He hopes to stay at the Met for many more years, he says. And what then? "I haven't come up with anything," he says. "Something in the performing arts? After the Met, probably not. But I've sometimes thought, given my expertise in labor relations, maybe something in sports, like football or baseball. And maybe something--I haven't thought this through, and I'll probably regret saying it--but if there was some position, given my love for this city.... I don't want to be a political creature, but if there was a way I could accomplish something in government, I wouldn't mind doing that."
But there is one thing, he says, of which he is sure. "I'll never retire," he says. "There's no such thing. Luciano says that if you retire for six months, you're dead. And even if I leave this kind of full-time position I'll always live in New York. I'm not going to live in the country and watch the grass grow. I want to be where the action is, and New York is where the action is." He smiles.
"I'm not going to go off and sit at the end of the dock with my fishing pole," he says. "I'd last about one good cigar." *
Mervyn Rothstein is an editor at The New York Times and a frequent contributor to Cigar Aficionado.


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This candle voltive has cats on each side. Line the interior with some thin scrap book paper and place a battery powered flicker candle inside. Do not use a real candle to avoid fire hazard. These battery flicker candles are cheap and safe. They work great and look good.
The project is 6" tall and 4 1/2" wide. All the pieces are 1/4" thick. The project could easily be used as a desk box for pencils.
The picture below shows all four sides lit with the flicker candle.
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Everyone's favorite Italian grandmother and likely next Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made headlines last week when he cautioned that "there's a strong likelihood that the next Pearl Harbor we confront could be a cyber attack." That's fear-mongering nonsense.
Look, we know cyber-security is an important issue. Stuxnet showed unequivocally that state-sponsored cyberwar is already upon us. News that the recent IMF hack was likely pulled off by a sovereign government feeds that fire. Hell, Anonymous is even kinda-sorta bullying NATO and the Federal Reserve, and meanwhile Lulz Sec is hitting the US Senate's Website.
And you know what? We were even okay with hearing the military muttering that "if you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks." Not because we want to see a war over some silly DDOS attack. But rather because it at least means the government is finally treating cyber-security seriously.
But a cyber attack will not be the "next Pearl Harbor."
Panetta is concerned by electronic attacks on the nation's electrical grid, and communications networks. As he should be. Cut off the heat to Chicago in the winter, or the AC to Atlanta in the summer, and you've got a situation where people are going to lose their lives. Cut off our communications and you disrupt our command and control operations. It's all bad.
But in order to seriously devastate the United States, to kill thousands of Americans and cripple our military as Pearl Harbor did, a cyber attack would need to be coupled with a military attack. And the only entities cable of launching that kind of coordinated attack are state actors.
And look, here's the deal, grandma: No state actor (especially not the Chinese with whom we've got a mutually beneficial relationship) is going to sucker punch us. Panetta is worried about the wrong thing.
We need a program focused not just on massive, system-wide attacks, but on the nickel and dime stuff that's taking a slow but steady toll. We need to be worried about the steady drumbeat of theft and espionage and vandalism that goes on daily, only a fraction of which makes the news. We need to sweat the incremental damage lone individuals and stateless groups can do to harass and harangue and weaken us. We need to understand what weaknesses in our information security allowed Bradley Manning and Wikileaks to access a treasure trove of our secrets. We need to identify and secure vital portions of our infrastructure, both public and private. And we need to not oversell the notion of total electronic devastation.
Yeah, the US needs to be worried about cyber-security. But if you want it to be effective, or to have anyone pay attention, it needs a realistic program that focuses not just on grandstanding and the pie in the sky threats, but on the real and present dangers we face right now.


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news snippets: Over 1350 Touhou Circles at C75, Mahou Shoujo Ai San May be the Year's Summer DaysWednesday, December 17th, 2008
I'm about to go to my last class for the next 3-4 weeks so I promise I'll do reviews and other things that aren't stupid nerd news some time soon, but until then:
Zepy had a good post about Comiket circles doing Touhou stuff over the years back in August, and the folks who made that have updated for this year: 1356 circles doing Touhou, up from 885. Good lord.
The other thing that came up last night that I was too busy watching Rosario + Vampire on tv to post about was that some folks on 2ch apparently got the new Mahou Shoujo Ai game a few days early (1, 2, 3), and well, if they're telling the truth, the game didn't really get a look-over before going gold, or something. As was pointed out to me by irc last night, this would normally not be a problem, since who the hell looks at anything but tentacles and the various parts that said tentacles interact with, but the problem is that in some scenes, the tentacles are missing. More than the tentacles, actually, it's that some scenes are missing any art at all, and even the paper dolls might be missing in some scenes.
This is compounded by the fact that the game is a third of the size of the previous installments (500mb on a dvd?!) They've also caught some flack for apparently using CG from previous games on their website and on the game box as promo art for the new game. Of course, this could all be a very elaborate, awesome troll (one of "epic" proportions, as i hear the kids say these days), or maybe they got the Doom 3 devs to make this new installment, but otherwise… Matsuri da!!


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Media 100 (http://www.media100.com) — a provider of advanced editing
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Released in August, Media 100 Suite brings editing and compositing to
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In addition to Blackmagic Design video I/O cards, Media 100 Suite
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version of Media 100 Suite is also available for free download.


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Firstly, I'd like to thank you for reading past the title and at least entertaining the idea that a ginseng or S-curve ficus could be a suitable piece of material for bonsai.
I recently wrote a piece (here) that shows what type of growth one could get out of this material.
Most people enjoyed it but two people in particular did not. I don't think these two ever read the post past the title or they would have seen the difference between the raw material and what a little growing out can do.
One curmudgeon is from the US and has been in the bonsai community for many years. He's at the point (after being involved in the many clubs and organizations around the world) where his life experiences dictates what advice or techniques he might share with a novice or intermediate.
The other bonsai-ist has been practicing (I'm sorry, practising) bonsai many years and seems set in his vision and styling of trees; anything new or different is hard for him to accept. Any variations in plant materials beyond what he sees in his neighborhood are baffling and its hard for him to envision a tree shape in, say, a ficus or portulacaria.
Both of these men have made names for themselves and have been in bonsai for a long while.
We see these types of people all the time in clubs; their catchphrases are "why do you want to waste your time on ________ when there's so much better material out there" or "don't waste your time on seeds/cuttings/seedlings, save your money for something bigger/better/older"
You know the type of people I'm talking about.
It's almost as though they've reached a second "Age of Disbelieving".
Either that or their perspective is, been there, done that, I'm older than you so I know best.
I'm here to tell you, it's neither age nor training nor eminence (or even imminence for that matter; meaning the hot new artist on the block) that bequeaths artistic vision. It's an open mind. If an artist rejects, out of hand, a piece of material, then he or she may only be a craftsman. Not an artist.
Lets proceed then, whaddayasay?
This tree, near as I can tell, was a ginseng ficus.
This tree was the subject of an earlier blogpost (click me!) and the tree looked like this
This was done at the end of July 2012. I would say that my operation was a success (it is April 2013). The trunk has thickened, copious branching has occurred, and I now have something to work with.
At the chop zones the number of branches is impressive.
This step in the process will be a matter of simplifying the tree, bringing the shoots at any one area to one or two, and some wiring.
The first step is always the roots.
You can see the original buttress that has the "ginseng" characteristic.
Let's talk about my theory a bit.
There's a nursery in Vero beach that is world famous for ficus bonsai. The man who ran the place for many years and I were talking recently. He has been raising seedling ficus for a several years now and he agrees with me that the so-called "ginseng" ficus is just a seedling f. microcarpa. I feel somewhat vindicated.
In Florida, when growing ficus, we get aerial roots. There are those who hate them. And those who love them.
My opinion is that if a tree puts them down, keep them.
But we do have to arrange them from time to time. This is art, after all.
Like this
And I do this around the tree.
Next I clean out unwanted branching
And like I said, it will be a simplifying of the shoots to one or two at each spot I need a branch.
Next is wire and branch placement.
But first, lets talk about the dreaded S-curve ficus.
Usually the variety is ficus microcarpa "retusa". Some common names you may hear are: tiger bark, keman, kingman, golden gate.
They are a good ficus to use as the internode spaces are short, the leaf is smaller and thicker than the regular f. microcarpa and they grow fast.
Here are two I picked up recently.
These are the bigger size.
As they grow the curve softens. The original trees probably looked like this
What is my vision for these two trees?
I bought them for the bases.
I'll chop them here
And regrow new tops on them.
They will be a subject of an upcoming post on airlayering.
One tree I'll just chop and make a cutting. The other I'll airlayer. I've never airlayered a ficus because they don't generally need it, a cutting this size is easy. But I'm curious to see what kind of results I'll get. Stay tuned for that.
This tree was an S-curve that was chopped and regrew.
The original trunk was like this
I did not do the trunk chop on this but it's where I would have done it.
This was from a batch I got really inexpensively at a nursery that has declined recently. As a result, I've had to nurse it back to health a bit. This year will be its main growth year.
The next S-curve is one I got years ago (maybe 5 or 6 years) and I paid too much. Having buyers remorse, I set it aside in a bigger pot and ignored it.
It began to get reverse taper (or inverse, or obverse. Adverse? I'm so confused!!!)
So I cut it back once and let it grow.
Here it is now
Not much of an S-curve left to it, is there? It's probably 2/3rds bigger than when I got it.
Lets do a play-by-play
The red line was the original curve.
The yellow line was where I cut back from the reverse taper (which is healed over already)
And the purple arrows show where aerial roots have grown down, erasing the curve.
I plan on chopping it this year to start its way on becoming a bonsai.
And here is the tree that caused all the ruckus:
And this tree has a "ginseng" quality to it
I did a post on this one here.
But this tree, well, it is also ginseng ficus.
Just add about 15 years
And a baseball.
The story of this one was chronicled last here
It has the same leaf shape, same bulbous trunk quality, same long internodes. If it looks, acts, and smells like…it must be.
Enough digression-
Back to our main subject methinks.
All wired
You'll notice how I filled in the spaces. This tree will be a banyan style.
The front
The branches are pretty thin and spindly; they will grow. There are some empty spots as well
The thing is, this is how it's done. If you grow a ficus bonsai (or any tree) you have to have the vision for the tree and what it will look like 10 years from now.
This, my friends, is the challenge and the difficulty that I, as an artist, seek.
If I wanted something easy I'd be using juniper. Seriously. The juniper is hard for beginners (because they use such little sticks) but its the easiest tree as an advanced bonsai-ist. You might trim it twice a year, wire it once every two years or so. Keep it outside in all temperatures and the hardest thing; water it.
And when you style one,it has a very "tree-like" look already. One only needs to arrange the branching and everyone thinks you're a magician.
A ficus is WORK, wire, un wire, wire, trim, cut, chop, repot, every year. Etc.
keep out if frosts, freezing, aphids, rust, thrips,whitefly…………ahhhhhhhhrrrrrggghhh!
So, since I'm claiming to be an artist and that I have vision, where do I think this tree will be in, say, ten years?
Here it is now
And here is what I see when I look at it.
Really. I do.
Well, the aerial roots are extravagant but, hey, they look cool.
As always, I'll post updates etc.


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The main obstacle to the widespread use of electric cars is the lack of a suitable battery. And the problem with the battery is the lack of materials to make it cheap, light and powerful.
Thus concluded a team of MIT researchers, who then set about identifying such materials. As reported in the April 16 issue of Nature, the team has succeeded, and in a novel way. They first predicted the composition of a promising material via computer models, then produced and tested it. It met their expectations.
The work is a step toward the researchers' overall goal. "Our dream as a team is to make a battery that will enable the dawn of the electric vehicle age," said Donald R. Sadoway, professor of materials chemistry and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.
The work also paves the way for a new approach to materials science. "To our knowledge, this is the first time a novel material has been predicted [on the computer] and actually made," said Gerbrand Ceder, associate professor of materials science and engineering (MSE) and first author of the Nature paper.
Professor Ceder and Sadoway's coauthors are Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics; MIT affiliate Mehmet K. Aydinol; Young-Il Jang, a graduate student in MSE, and Biying Huang, a postdoctoral associate in MSE.
A battery has three parts: two electrodes (a cathode and anode) separated by an electrolyte. Chemical reactions at the electrodes produce an electronic current that can be made to flow through an appliance connected to the battery. In a rechargeable battery, once the reactions have run their course, they can be reversed by the action of a power supply or charger.
The material reported in Nature was developed for the cathode of a rechargeable lithium battery, which boasts the highest energy density of any rechargeable (it will run longer between charges). Currently the key cathode material in such batteries is a compound of lithium, cobalt and oxygen. But cobalt is extremely expensive. As a result, these batteries are used only in small devices like cellular phones and laptop computers. A lithium battery for an electric car "would cost you about $20,000 and still the vehicle would travel only about 120 miles on a full charge," Professor Sadoway said.
With the assistance of Dr. Aydinol, Professor Ceder began the hunt for a replacement material by first determining via computer calculations how the cathode in a rechargeable lithium battery works. That led to an important surprise: he found that the cobalt is not as important to the chemical reactions in the cathode as had been thought.
"Gerd's deeper understanding of how lithium cobalt oxide works allowed us to identify an entire class of materials that had previously been ignored for this application," Professor Sadoway said.
The calculations showed that aluminum, which is cheap and light, or other metals in the same class could be used in place of cobalt. The work further predicted that a compound containing aluminum would generate a higher cell voltage (resulting in a more powerful battery) than the conventional cobalt version.
"This was all well and good, but now show me the evidence," said Professor Sadoway, who noted that the researchers still had another problem. The predicted compound, lithium aluminum oxide, in its pure form does not conduct electrons. "In a cathode, this material would be all voltage and no current. It wouldn't work." Some modification was in order.
So the team widened the circle again, drafting Professor Chiang, a ceramist, who pointed out that adding back some cobalt would solvethe conductivity problem. In other words, a mixture of lithium aluminum oxide and lithium cobalt oxide should meet the requirements.
The next challenge was making the new material. This wasn't trivial. Among other things, Professor Ceder's models showed that the aluminum and cobalt had to be incorporated at very specific sites to get the predicted properties. A synthesis technique refined by Professor Chiang worked perfectly, however, and his graduate student, Mr. Jang, produced the "designer materials" to specification. (Different samples contained different proportions of aluminum and cobalt.)
Dr. Huang, working with Professor Sadoway, took the resulting samples--then powders--and made each into a functioning cathode. Next step: create a battery by coupling each new cathode with a conventional anode and electrolyte.
"We tested them in my lab and they worked like a charm," Professor Sadoway said. "We got, as predicted, substantial increases in cell voltage."
In fact, the cathodes with higher levels of aluminum worked a bit too well. "It got to a point where the cell voltage became so high that the electrolyte became unstable," he said.
Another key part of the battery work is the development of a new electrolyte. A fourth faculty member on the MIT team recently succeeded in doing just that (the work was not reported in the Nature article).
Enter Anne M. Mayes, the Class of '48 Associate Professor of Polymer Physics in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Professor Mayes's new electrolyte, a polymer, has a variety of novel properties. For one, it's a solid. Conventional electrolytes are liquid, which limits the shape of the battery (you need some kind of vessel to hold the liquid).
But the new electrolyte conceived by Professor Mayes is flexible. A battery made of it "would be something with the consistency of a potato-chip bag," Professor Sadoway said. "You could fold it up to make any number of different configurations." For example, imagine a car powered by a battery that's incorporated into the body panels.
The researchers recently created a battery with the new electrolyte, the new cathode and a conventional anode. This realizes the MIT team's first solid-state lithium battery, or one made completely of solids. And that brings the researchers closer to their ultimate goal.
"The American marketplace will not be interested in an electric car that can't go at least 200 miles before recharging," Professor Sadoway said. "In my judgment, the only technology that has a prayer of propelling a car that far is the solid-state lithium battery. That's based on theoretical studies and on our knowledge of materials' energy densities."
Work continues on the solid-state lithium battery. For example, with their new insight on how the cathode works, the researchers are exploring new materials that might work even better than those reported in Nature. They are also looking at new anode materials, a task that was always less of a priority because present anode materials don't have as many limitations.
Professor Ceder stressed the value of tackling the work as a team. "We couldn't have done this with any one of us missing," he said. "It's an unusually close and good collaboration.
"I think getting four high-strung professors together is not always that easy," he concluded with a smile.
The work has been funded in part by Furukawa Electric Co. and the DOE's Idaho National Engineering Laboratory University Research Consortium. Pacific Lithium, Ltd., has licensed a number of the patent applications submitted by the MIT inventors.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on April 29, 1998.


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Emirates flies past 20 years of service in Oman
Emirates is marking 20 years of service to Muscat today, having carried nearly 2.4 million passengers on the route since flights began on 1st July 1993.
Amongst the first to offer his congratulations was Finance Manager Sadiq Khaliq, Emirates' longest serving Omani member of staff who joined dnata's Finance department in 1969 before moving to Emirates when the airline was formed 16 years later.
"Twenty years of service to Muscat is a great achievement and I am pleased that Emirates has gradually developed this route," said Mr Khaliq. "Unfortunately, I don't fly much anymore, I used to travel a lot to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, India and Egypt."
A total of 79 Omani staff are employed across the Emirates Group in a variety of roles, amongst them 15 cabin crew and eight pilots.
"To my surprise, I was the first Omani pilot to join Emirates in March 1995, said Airbus A380Captain, Saleh Alkharusi, who has proudly watched Emirates grow in the Omani capital.
"The Muscat sector is memorable to fly because you have the stunning Dubai coastline on departure, passing the Burj Khalifa, and then you're met with the distinctive Oman coastline as you approach Muscat. Soon, the new terminal will open at Muscat International Airport, presenting further opportunities for Emirates," Captain Alkharusi added.
The airline currently has two flights a day serving Muscat, normally operated with an Airbus A330-200 in a three class configuration, but sometimes upgraded to a larger Boeing 777, depending on demand.
Sheikh Majid Al Mualla, Emirates' Senior Vice President for the Gulf, Middle East & Iran, said the 20th anniversary is an important milestone for all those who have been involved with Muscat and the 2.39 million passengers who have travelled to and from Dubai.
"Oman has been a significant market for us and feeds key markets such as India, Morocco, the UK, Germany, North America, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines and Australia, all via our magnificent hub in Dubai."
"When you think that Muscat was our 30th destination and we now have 134 routes, it demonstrates the extraordinary growth of the airline in a relatively short space of time," added Sheikh Majid.
Muscat is also a valued destination for Emirates SkyCargo with large volumes of cargo being carried out of Muscat to markets in the Indian Ocean, Europe and Asia via the world-class Cargo Mega Terminal in Dubai.
"Popular commodities being shipped include perishables like fish and beans, in addition to perfumery products and oil exploration equipment," said Saif Al Anboori, Emirates' Cargo Manager for Oman.
Omani products feature prominently on board Emirates' flights. The Delucia brand of sweet Thai chilli sauce comes from Oman, as do green and red peppers and sometimes the honey served to passengers.
The list doesn't stop there; eggplant, spring onions, mint leaves, okra (gumbo), spinach, pumpkins, rocca leaves, bananas, methi (fenugreek) leaves, bitter gourd (melon) and zatar all hail from Oman.
Emirates Holidays, the airline's tour operating arm has been offering tailor-made holidays in Oman since 1996, and has carried over 25,000 passengers to Dubai and beyond.
Oman remains a key source market in the GCC for Emirates Holidays. Some of the most popular holiday packages for travellers from Oman are for destinations such as Dubai, the Indian Ocean, Africa, the Far East and Europe.
A total of 34 Emirates' staff support the Muscat office, which is led by Asma Al Rahma, Manager Oman.
EK867 departs Muscat at 0455hrs and gets into Dubai at 0555hrs. EK863 departs Muscat at 1055hrs and gets into Dubai at 1155hrs.