THE DIRT

In the process of making this album I found out about the Durga Puja Festival, the most important Festival in Bengal. One of four essential elements in the composition of the clay used to make the many Durga statues for the festival is dirt from the ground in front of the doorway of a prostitute’s house. Of the many proposed stories as to why this is, I prefer the view that the Goddess Durga accepts ALL aspects of the feminine and of Woman, from the sacred to the profane, and that if we are to truly embrace Woman within ourselves, we need to remember and reclaim our own inner whore, recognizing all the ways we reject this within and outside of ourselves.

Then I discovered that the world’s longest running brothel was just over an hour from my home. So off we went to take pictures for the album in the haunted Dumas Brothel of Butte, Montana, which served the booming international mining culture for almost 100 years, from 1890 to 1982. Much more can be said of the rich, complex, bittersweet culture still palpable inside the brothel, but that is for another time.