IN: Mircea Eliade (Romanian: ['mirtSea eli'ade]; March 9 [O.S. February 24] 1907 - April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential.

Born in Bucharest, he was the son of Romanian Land Forces officer Gheorghe Eliade (whose original surname was Ieremia) and Jeana nee Vasilescu. An Orthodox believer, Gheorghe Eliade registered his son's birth four days before the actual date, to coincide with the liturgical calendar feast of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. Mircea Eliade had a sister, Corina, the mother of semiologist Sorin Alexandrescu. His family moved between Tecuci and Bucharest, ultimately settling in the capital in 1914, and purchasing a house on Melodiei Street, near Piata Rosetti, where Mircea Eliade resided until late in his teens. Eliade kept a particularly fond memory of his childhood and, later in life, wrote about the impact various unusual episodes and encounters had on his mind. In one instance during the World War I Romanian Campaign, when Eliade was about ten years of age, he witnessed the bombing of Bucharest by German zeppelins and the patriotic fervor in the occupied capital at news that Romania was able to stop the Central Powers' advance into Moldavia. He described this stage in his life as marked by an unrepeatable epiphany. Recalling his entrance into a drawing room that an "eerie iridescent light" had turned into "a fairy-tale palace", he wrote, I practiced for many years [the] exercise of recapturing that epiphanic moment, and I would always find again the same plenitude. I would slip into it as into a fragment of time devoid of duration--without beginning, middle, or end. During my last years of lycee, when I struggled with profound attacks of melancholy, I still succeeded at times in returning to the golden green light of that afternoon. [...] But even though the beatitude was the same, it was now impossible to bear because it aggravated my sadness too much. By this time I knew the world to which the drawing room belonged [...] was a world forever lost. Robert Ellwood, a professor of religion who did his graduate studies under Mircea Eliade, saw this type of nostalgia as one of the most characteristic themes in Eliade's life and academic writings.
QUESTION: Which was the epiphanic moment?
IN: Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 - September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947). Partch composed with scales dividing the octave into 43 unequal tones derived from the natural harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals to the octave.

Partch made public his theories in his book Genesis of a Music (1947). He opens the book with an overview of music history, and argues that Western music began to suffer from the time of Bach, after which twelve-tone equal temperament was adopted to the exclusion of other tuning systems, and abstract, instrumental music became the norm. Partch sought to bring vocal music back to prominence, and adopted tunings and scales he believed more suitable to singing. Inspired by Sensations of Tone, Hermann von Helmholtz's book on acoustics and the perception of sound, Partch based his music strictly on just intonation. He tuned his instruments using the overtone series, and extended it past the twelfth partial. This allowed for a larger number of smaller, unequal intervals than found in the Western classical music tradition's twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch's tuning is often classed as microtonality, as it allowed for intervals smaller than 100 cents, though Partch did not conceive his tuning in such a context. Instead, he saw it as a return to pre-Classical Western musical roots, in particular to the music of the ancient Greeks. By taking the principles he found in Helmholtz's book, he expanded his tuning system until it allowed for a division of the octave into 43 tones based on ratios of small integers. Partch uses the terms Otonality and Utonality to describe chords whose pitch classes are the harmonics or subharmonics of a given fixed tone. These six-tone chords function in Partch's music much the same that the three-tone major and minor chords (or triads) do in classical music. The Otonalities are derived from the overtone series, and the Utonalities from the undertone series.
QUESTION: What else did he cover in the book?
IN: "Vogue" is a song by American singer Madonna from her second soundtrack album I'm Breathless (1990). It was released as the first single from the album on March 27, 1990, by Sire Records. Madonna was inspired by vogue dancers and choreographers Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza and Luis Xtravaganza from the Harlem "House Ball" community, the origin of the dance form, and they introduced "Vogueing" to her at the Sound Factory club in New York City. "

The video was directed by David Fincher and shot at The Burbank Studios in Burbank, California on February 10-11, 1990. According to Lucy O'Brien in her book Madonna: Like an Icon, the video was brought together after a "huge casting call" in Los Angeles where hundreds of different sorts of dancers appeared. Filmed in black-and-white, the video recalls the look of films and photography from The Golden Age of Hollywood with the use of artwork by the Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka and an Art Deco set design. Many of the scenes are recreations of photographs taken by noted photographer Horst P. Horst, including his famous Mainbocher Corset, Lisa with Turban (1940), and Carmen Face Massage (1946). Horst was reportedly "displeased" with Madonna's video because he never gave his permission for his photographs to be used and received no acknowledgement from Madonna. Some of the close-up poses recreate noted portraits of such stars as Marilyn Monroe, Veronica Lake, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Jean Harlow. (Additionally, several stars of this era were name-checked in the song's lyrics.) Several famous Hollywood portrait photographers whose style and works are referenced include George Hurrell, Eugene Robert Richee, Don English, Whitey Schafer, Ernest Bachrach, Scotty Welbourne, Laszlo Willinger, and Clarence Sinclair Bull. The video features the dancers for Madonna's then-upcoming Blond Ambition Tour - Donna De Lory, Niki Harris, Luis Xtravaganza Camacho, Jose Gutierez Xtravaganza, Salim Gauwloos, Carlton Wilborn, Gabriel Trupin, Oliver Crumes and Kevin Stea. The choreography was set by "Punk Ballerina" Karole Armitage. The video premiered worldwide on MTV on March 29, 1990, and it also premiered on BET on November 22 that same year, making itthe first video by Madonna to air on an African-American channel. There are two versions of the video, the regularly aired television music video, and the 12-inch remix, which is the extended version over three minutes longer.
QUESTION:
how did the casting call go?