Rats In The Gutter

Happy Fourth of July! Just kidding. There’s no way either rat would ever attach positive affect to a day celebrating the most obnoxious landmass this side of Pangea (and wasn’t SHE a bitch). But the rats WILL settle for shitting on its golden child Taylor Swift whose wedding, despite being a BIG SECRET, we can practically remote-view with full accuracy for the Shein-flavoured polyester nightmare that it most definitely was; and, not to be bested (and certainly testifying to the spiritual pettiness of the whole American race) Beyonce’s surprise release of new music to pull focus from the White Devil (quote Ivy Wolk) probably landed as well as Lena Dunham’s awkward speech about all football players being secretly gay. The rats LOVE a wild and unfounded speculation about a male celeb’s secret fruitiness. However, the gays probably don’t want to be tarnished with that big white brush, except for the beige gays who already worship Taylor (and to be clear, Taylor gays are the ones that think salt is a spice and consider Twilight ‘literature’). But enough about an empire in decline; this week the rats also discuss contemporary NZ art. Specifically, is Dick Frizelle’s Mickey to Tiki a problematic faux pas, a benign piece of pop history, or a prescient foreshadowing of our inexplicably deepening relationship with a neo-colonizer? Okay yeah the rats can’t stop themselves from harping on about America. But that’s like, only because their new ambassador here wishes we’d renege our stance on nuclear power/weaponry and like, this is pretty much the beginning of an ugly and drawn out end of American hegemony, which if we had any sense as a country at all we’d get well clear of; just like you’d get clear of the smelly drunk guy at a house party who no one can remember inviting, but that everyone’s afraid of because he seems totally volatile. Yeah. Merika.Where do the rats fit on the spectrum of Kats Mansfield to Bonnie Blue? Find out at Patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

Holy mackerel, what the effing eff is wrong with this country? Referring of course to the vermin issue NZ is currently facing. The vermin in question? Not your usual bright eyed fluffy tailed hosts, but one neoconservative Christian asshole, a reverend (is he?) B. Tamaki whose recent vitriol—a literal call to exterminate immigrants/muslims—is being met with the kind of infuriating lassez faire that, where D Church and related parties is concerned, we’ve unfortunately come to expect. As if this sort of ideological tarnish was something that just goes away by itself; like an STD you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge, so you start rinsing with apple cider vinegar and stop looking down when you pee and hope for the best rather than go to the Puhutukawa Clinic where you just KNOW the nurse will guilt you into starting the humiliating text chain of notifying potential exposures (say goodbye to your situationship lol). But seriously, between Brian and One Nation across the ditch, and NZ high schoolers denying the Holocaust in class (a real thing) you start to wonder if the conspiracy theorists who revile CERN for jumping us around timelines might actually be on to something. Like, who could’ve predicted back in the innocence of the early 2000s that THIS is where we’d end up. Oh, did we say innocence? We forgot that America killed like a million people in the Middle East. I mean, that was the decade Britney’s Black Out was released, so pardon us for being distracted. Oh yes, then there was that big September thing at the beginning of the decade. So…maybe we’ve only imagined this time of innocence and actually we’ve been languishing in American-stoked geopolitical chaos since, well, forever. So if anything’s truly changed maybe it’s just our perception and we’ve actually been living in hell this whole time. Who can say. Also this week; the oddity of Madonna, the ever-loving lure and hype of drink driving (caveat, neither rat has ever done this), the unshakeable feeling that it’s all for nothing, the creeping dread of a dying world, the niggling regret of knowing you don’t really love your partner and maybe wanna go gay, the REAL reason Rihanna hasn’t released music since 2015 (Gen Z says who?) and, finally, a sample of Susan Boyle’s leaked EDM single ‘Unpasteurised’ off her forthcoming new album Twin Peaks; Ballads about my Big Juicy Naturals.Fund our adrenochrome aspirations at Patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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

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.