Effigy: An Audio Folly

Just Smoke.

No one is who they are supposed to be.

"They Swell Up Like Toads."

S1:E8 Firing Squad Ambitions Quickly and easily listen to Effigy for free!

Episode 8, "Firing Squad" ambitions ends our Season One tale.

With Episode 8, Effigy Season One is now fully bingeable. If you were waiting for that "gapless experience," tarry no more!

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Last episode of the season drops tomorrow morning. It's been a minute since the last ep—need a refresher?

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efore Victor Milner became the renowned cinematographer on such pre-code classics as "Design For Living" and "Trouble in Paradise," he was a newsreel photographer for Pathe.

When the Mine Roof Falls (Narr. by Colm O'Reilly), by Chris Schoen from the album Sounds From Effigy, Season 1

If you're sick of Alice's Restaurant, but looking for something captivating that lasts about 18 minutes this Thanksgiving, we've remixed a highlight from Episode 2, "When the Mine Roof Falls," read by the incomparable Colm O'Reilly.

We've succeeded as a podcast if you observe after listening, oh, no, no, they spent way too much time on this.

The marvel of history, at least as it is beheld at the Effigy home office, is that nothing dies as long as there are human minds to live in. The horror is that those same minds can and do bring the past back to our beloved earth all over again.

But irregular shapes also have centers, even when those centers are (paradoxically?) multiple. I hope you've had an experience of remaining in some kind of orbit as you listen, even when the path was not always, let's say, mathematically predicable.

It is uncanny and humbling, and hopefully it provides a little ballast to my tendency to drift too much. This is a podcast largely about drift itself, about how digression forms a much more direct narrative line than we may expect, even dealing with historical events.

I've done almost nothing to heighten these resonances in the narrative. They are self-heightening for anyone following the news in real time. (IMO anyway; please lmk if your experience differs!)

But the resonances with the lives of Palestinians in the last 8 months, and in the decades of occupation before that have shimmered in each episode script as if they were written in silver.

...and beyond. (We'll call it a wrap with Episode 10.)

The topical subject matter of this podcast season has not changed. We trace the same arc we began with, which follows the course (with ample detours) of the Southern Colorado coal strike of 1913/14, up to and through the Ludlow Massacre (which we examine in the latest episode)...

For season one we have made the questionable decision to write each episode sequentially, more or less, meaning that each episode since October 2023 has been crafted in an event-scape that is weighted heavily upon by news from and about Gaza.

A short thread, for listeners new and old.
When we were 4 episodes in, the state of Israel began its current extermination campaign in the Gaza strip. Life was a struggle for many Gazans before this campaign, but it became a true nightmare thereafter, every day a new Guernica.

S1:E1 Glück Auf! <p>The premiere episode of Effigy's first season: Ludlow, story of a strike. </p><p>Cold open from "Coal Catechism" (1906), William Jasper Nicholls. And we orienteer from there.</p><p>Clips:...

New listeners are cordially urged to start with Episode 1, and to skip an episode with the same peril as you would skip a fine dinner on an expense account.

Buen provecho!