Rats In The Gutter

Well holly friggin moly if the apocalypse train hasn’t already left the station, which it has, and gosh darn it don’t we have whip lash. And to think, we’re BARELY into phase one of the reptilian terraforming procedure, and the rats already feel like calling parley with the overlords; if only because the high cortisol environment of collapse is actually very bad for gut health (and everything else). And yet the rats are choosing discourse over despair (this week anyway). And in doing so, conversations ensue in which intellectual grandstanding stops being the purview of book-tokers who need us to know they’ve adopted Landian Accelerationism as a personality, and starts being the giddy flex of two dopamine-deficient optimists who at the end of the day (and just like YOU) only want to have a good time. For example, the need for a system that won’t gleefully march us into miserable omnicide of every life form on the planet goes beyond some cuddly-feely world-spirit. Rather, it’s completely aesthetic! To take a quote from Oscar Wilde; “I’m pro socialism because I don’t wanna leave my house and see a bunch of poor people, it’s a total bummer”. Okay we’re paraphrasing. But seriously, wanting to make the world a better place doesn’t need to get much more complicated than that. Unless you’re Elon Musk and you somehow think your asset list magically translates into utopia, the same way we’ve been taught to believe in ‘trickle down’. Well I guess trickle down does exist, but it must be a burst sewer pipe over our heads because what’s reaching us down here in the fetid gutters of late stage capitalism is swill and shit. And not even fresh shit. It’s the backed up shit of a world that’s been dying for decades, maybe for the better part of a century. Sorry, we mentioned we were trying to have a good time. But maybe having a good time also means trying to do something about the bad time. Because like, call me crazy, but an open air prison piled thick with corpses and human misery isn’t exactly a party venue. It’s a mass grave honey. Also, the rats provide an update on Nicola Willis’s clearly embattled Ozempic journey. Stay tuned.Venture into our Backrooms at Patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

This week, Johanna describes the best live performance she’s ever seen in her life—which is saying something, as a seasoned performer herself, and someone very much in the world. It’s a piece called A Year Without Summer by a recently internet-famous artist, thanks to a performance at the Venice Biennial in which she played a human dongle inside a giant bell (and so, The Bell Woman). Summer takes her out of the bell jar and into a long wet orgiastic bacchanal of carnal delight and mayhem. If Caligula had more of an eye for stage production, basically. And dear god is it heartening to know that enormous, antagonistic, unsafe unfiltered work is still being funded SOMEWHERE, and that there are artists still willing and capable of pulling off extremism without settling for Tumblr-friendly provocation (cough, Sam Levinson). Also on the agenda this week, we reel like the rest of the country as our government stops even pretending like they don’t want us all to die, and aren’t actively taking steps to make this happen (because they are). I mean, cutting public servant roles and replacing them with literal SkyNet is, um, maybe not the buzz; and yet here we are anyway, getting ready to feel the inevitable shit wave once it’s CoPilot calling the shots (and, being Nicola Willis’s preferred AI module, why not?). Lord knows we’ll REALLY be feeling that mythical trickle-down once the binary-bot that usually walks you through your spreadsheets is deciding which families are worthy of financial support, and which should be street-walking in Dickensian rags holding a tin cup out for shrapnel from strangers. Yeah, so cool and normal aye. Also also, the rats take back their previous stance on Fritter Fest and wonder if they have the combined culinary prowess to have their own truck at the next inaugural event—whether sweet or savoury offerings is something undecided as yet, but nothing they can’t figure out over a weekend vision board. Finally, the rats mourn the loss of one of the Topp Twins, and tend to agree with the surviving twin’s AMA speech in which Ole Paul Goldstein (sorry, Goldsmith) and his pie-loving cuck-party had their 2-billion dollar defence-slice questioned. I mean, we’re not actively trying to start a war with anyone are we? Is that something we’re into, as a country? Like, there are easier more fun ways to nosedive into the abyss than friggin war (and they all involve orgies at crack dens, just saying).patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

Well, as winter descends and New Zealanders retreat into Bronte flavoured gothic doldrums, some turn to the familiar for comfort, the known, the whimsical. And for the rats, this can sometimes mean indulging in a slightly embarrassing but mostly innocuous nostalgia watch of Adventure Time, which should actually have its roses as aforward-thinking animation that still smacks of post-modern vitalities and contemporary myth making in a media landscape that is annoyingly obsessed with (still, if you can believe it) teenagers having sex. I mean, at the very least it seems like Sam Levinson’s third season of Euphoria is pissing people off intentionally, making them feel icky enough they regret ever citing the first two seasons as quote-unquote ‘quality’. Which anyone who grew up on Skins could already plainly see was a complete ruse. Also; the rats comprehensively tackle (cough) the cultural weirdness of gooning and maxxing, which currently exist as a sort-of binary of optimisation and its opposite. Basically, the maxxer games the system like a chaos magician, working advantages and discarding anything that impedes upward mobility; while the gooner intentionally casts his time and energy on the fire, wasting himself into oblivion through porn-flavoured idles in an attempt to wrangle some agency back from the hampster wheel of late-stage capitalism. Which is the better method? More importantly, what kind of material conditions could create something like the dedicated gooner, a wastrel as committed to the bit of passive self destruction as a performance artist from the late seventies, or a sixteenth century martyr. There is so much of Bartleby the Scrivener in gooning, Herman Melville’s short story in which Bartleby—a words man—passively refuses the mundane tasks of his position (“I would prefer not to”) with such radical consistency that he is eventually locked up for it. All because he refuses to participate and lend his energies to a system of bureaucratic lashes and genocidal vim. The gooner is essentially Bartleby with wifi.Looking for more goon material? patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

Jesus H Christ is it a crime to be messy these days or what? Seriously, the optimisation metrics, this ideology of converting every micro-event into revenue is becoming very effing suffocating. Like seriously, is there no inch on god’s green (ish) earth safe from the parasitic reach of The Economic Incentive? In this vacuum packed cat suit of a social climate the rats wonder about the true value of performative politeness, and whether we might be better off showing each other our teeth every once in a while; especially seeing as the edicts of politeness are rooted in maintaining bourgeois orders, vertically stacked ones of the haves and have nots etcetera. This is obviously not licence to treat other people badly, but it is something of a call to consider the essential mysteries of being human and act accordingly, to treat each other as the exhaustive evolutionary miracles we are rather than a collection of standardised pathologies and KPIs, with trackable social-media interfaces. God forbid we should try to confuse the lines drawn for us by acting outside of them, however this might look . Something of a necessity, actually, when those lines are put in place by a sprawling network of genocidal imperialism. Anyway The Devil Wears Prada 2 is out! While one rat feels meh about it the other is candidly surprised by how not shit it is. Obviously things could’ve gone either way. While Sam hasn’t seen it (on principle) Johanna breaks down all the ways it tries (we’ll assume limply) to lambast the vacuity of fashion under late stage capitalism, which is as far away from being art as Christopher Luxon is from being a competent prime minister. But just like Luxon, Prada 2s more cutting critique’s of capitalism overall are…absent. But I guess you’ve gotta give it its chops, that a film about fashion coming out in a world where luxury consumerism is provenly anything but benign (this isn’t 2006 anymore) could even attempt to have some acumen, some awareness, even though it clearly doesn’t reach Sontag levels of criticism. I guess it’s sort of like watching a criminal lawyer (maybe Epstein’s?) monologue about the evils of lying. Or watching an evangelical christian pastor with a DL Grindr account lecture a room of depressed normies about the sanctity of marriage. In a nut shell, the call is coming from inside the house.Do you remember Hopoating your friends on the playground? Playing Buck Buck with the hopes of grinding on the jock? Join us at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

In honour of Tāmaki Noir tonight being hosted by Emma and featuring Samuel here's an episode from the back catalogue.a refined and amiable guest - this week we talk to journalist Emma Gleason about life, love, and the dystopian abolishment of truth in a media landscape that has no center.Delve into our back catalogue, bonus episodes and video content at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

A flashback to when Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson joined forces with Rats In The Gutter’s Johanna Cosgrove and Samuel Te Kani. This special one-off live event, we tempt the lawyers by covering modern Pride, recent break ups and gay All Blacks.

RERUN: The Rats are taking a much deserved recording break, please enjoy this episode from the back catalogue.In this introductory episode, Samuel and Johanna explore their many indulgences toeing the line between self-care and self-harm, including (among other things) sex toys, weak white men, drinking as a national sport, smoking, full blown Burger King addiction and clinical inter-dependency.

This week the rats acknowledge that they’ve had something of a hiatus, without offering apology. The world is coo coo crazy right now and if the most charismatic gutter-creatures in the southern hemisphere (ask anyone) feel like taking a break, then they’ll damn well do so, without seeking approval first. That’s how rats and narcoleptics roll. First up, the rats tackle the current feud between Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX, if only because talking about anything else at the moment (like the oil-slick creep of WW3, cabals of child-eating rapists, the unbearable bot-bullying of Chappel Roan) is just too much for the nervous system. Also, the rats discuss the difference between ‘organic community’ and ‘astro turf’, wondering aloud if they’ve missed their chance for belonging somewhere stable and good because of their priors (cough). And finally (while skipping a few erudite topics, for the sake of brevity) the rats grapple with the cosmically confounding, metabolically mysterious matter of Dog Shit, which (because dogs are so undignified that they eat literal shit) is like the shit of the very last human in the centipede, a substance so void of mineral and nutritional value that it sits somewhere between rocks and dust, but more putrid than both. That’s what you get when you’re a casual bottom feeder—clumps of anti-matter coming out of your rear end (and then, because you left your baggies at hime, its somebody’ else’s problem). It’s kind of a beautiful allegory for the current cultural ice age, really. Like whether it be movies or music or fashion or even literature, we seem to have lost any interest in chronicling ourselves with the adventure and majesty of previous eras. Either that or millennial eyes are just blind to an emerging art which only looks like a breaching turd in its early stages, and which will eventually be pushed out as a golden egg. Who can say.Contemplate Charli XCX, Kabuki Theatre and K9 Excrement with us at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

The body keeps the score, and this week the rat-bodies are bedraggled, bewitched, bewigged, and decidedly simian. Which is to say, despite recent salmonella attacks (taking out both towers) the rats are present and ready to tour anyone who’ll listen through the jumble-bin of a week-in-review. Which includes; an objectively stellar idea for a dive bar named Throbs and Leaks which, having a backroom, does exactly what it says it does on the packet; the unbearable lightness of Intellectual Property; the necessity of strategic self starvation when bottoming frequently, and the dysmorphia-adjacent pitfalls of doing so; the necrotic pull of reality television as an Only Fans pipeline (becoming more and more attractive as our government reveals itself as increasingly hostile towards anyone with less than a billion in savings); the abusive relationship most of the country has with KFC (because the colonel is a cruel taskmaster with little regard for your colon, hates it in fact); the architectural grandeur of cum gutters; and, as always, the profundity of corporeal being with its fixed duration and the sometimes incomprehensible fact that death will eventually come for us all, even if we cannot envision it right now because life seems so deceptively stable day to day, despite the geopolitical nightmare we all currently reside in, and the looming impossibility of a gas crisis whose fetid edges we’re already experiencing, hurtling towards the storm’s leering eye of public transport and excessive cardio. Yes, it’s an exciting but trying time to be alive and while everything we’ve ever known starts splitting down the middle you could argue there’s no better place to be than right here in the gutter, because at the very least, when the seas rise and fire starts falling from the sky and Jojo Siwa unleashes a plague of new singles (we hope not) we’ll be together. Throb and leak in our backroom at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter