Mysterium #1 The Art of Darkness Podcast

My favorite podcast about the dark side of deceased writers, filmmakers, poets, and other artists.

Welcome to Mysterium, a curated list where I introduce you to the art, music, writing, and other cultural media objects that I find interesting, enlightening, and entertaining. Everything shared in this space is stuff I personally value and enjoy and, in some way, informs my own artistic worldview. Throughout my life the music, art, film, and literature I’ve come to love was shared with me by passionate friends. I want to pass forward and share the things I love through this curated space. I also encourage readers to engage with the work and share it with others in order to widen the creative cultural space.

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The Art of Darkness Podcast

I work thirty minutes away, forty-five or so on my way home due to traffic, so I have a bit of daily alone time in the car. Sometimes I enjoy the drive in silence, no music, just the road and the gorgeous Lowcountry marshland, but more often than not I like to listen to podcasts. Audiobooks, don’t work for me, especially fiction which I prefer to read in a comfortable environment where I can completely immerse myself in the work. Podcasts, like talk radio, fall in the sweet spot between mindless music and more immersive text. The best podcast that I listen to is The Art of Darkness: A Podcast About the Dark Side of Creativity by writers Kevin Kautzman and Brad Kelly.

I’ve always loved history, more specifically cultural history. Politics, wars, battles, and macro-historical events are interesting but I’ve always preferred the personal, the individual scale. As a writer, I’m interested in people, and characters that shaped our world by contributing to culture through art, literature, and other creative forms of expression. Men like Walt Disney, Stanly Kubrick, and H.P. Lovecraft, through their creative work, have been fundamental cultural forces in our culture and their impact on how we perceive the world around us is undeniable. I’m interested in how they thought, how they grew up, and how their lives impacted and influenced their creative output.

The Art of Darkness Podcast is an outstanding look into the life of interesting personalities, providing interesting biographical insights along with entertaining commentary. About twice a month the hosts, Brad and Kevin, choose a subject and put in the time going through biographies, interviews, narratives, and work, then informally present a biographical and historical overview of the artist in a several-hour-long episode. Beyond the main biographical core episodes, Brad and Kevin also host discussions where guests, who are often experts in the field, writers and artists, or just interesting personalities, range across multiple subjects that are related to the main subjects covered.

This past year I’ve listened through the majority of past episodes, they are starting their fourth year now, and the quality of information and entertainment is excellent. I’ve listened to episodes on artists like Lucille Ball, Frank Herbert, Emile Cioran, and Phillip K. Dick who I’m familiar with but managed to learn new tidbits and facts about their work, but most of all I’ve listened to episodes about writers that I knew nothing about or ignored and after listening to the episode I went out and picked up some of their work and became enamored with them. A great example is Roberto Bolano, who I ignored due to equating him with the Latin American Magical Realism crowd which I find objectionably dull. After listening to the AoD episode on him I was intrigued and read his novel The Savage Detectives, a novel I consider a masterpiece and one of my all-time favorites. Right now on my desk, I have several books that I purchased due to Art of Darkness and I look forward to expanding my knowledge and understanding of the creative culture that we are part of.

Some of my favorite episodes of the show are the outstanding, and very in-depth episode on Alistair Crowley, a subject I knew very little about. The Roberto Bolano, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Ernst Junger, and Charles Bukowski. Each episode besides being informative is damn entertaining and Kevin and Brad present the information in a tight professional but informal fashion that is a pleasure to listen to.

You can listen to each episode for free on YouTube and Spotify, but I suggest you subscribe to The Art of Darkness Patreon. Supporting independent media is critical in our corporate techno-demonic clown world and if you throw Brad and Kevin some of that lucre you get to support great work and also take part in a monthly bookclub along with having access to shorter exclusive post-episode discussion videos that are worth the price.

The Art of Darkness is no shit the best podcast focusing on the lives of dead artists and writers out there. In one year of listening I’ve learned more art history, literary history, and film history than in all of the college courses I’ve taken in my youth. I’ve also discovered a lot of writers and artists I did not know about and most of all I’ve found the experience to be damn entertaining.

Give Kevin and Brad a listen and support their show.