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.

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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

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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

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The spiral continues! Though getting out of bed at the moment feels like the effort equivalent of pulling wooden splinters out of your own sphincter, the rats (along with billions of other misguided humans on this planet) are doing it anyway—and how! Despite our Sisyphean misgivings about being alive, this week the chats are as torrid and torrential as ever, starting off strong with a query; if the billionaires get to eat people, then why can’t we? Why should richos get to have all the fun! Why not bring back kai tangata, that oft maligned tradition of eating one’s enemies. David Seymour a la carte? Would certainly be the correct time (and purpose) to buy an air fryer, and they’ve really gone down in price these last six months so all signs point to KFD (Kentucky Fried David). Also, after getting on the anti Wuthering Heights bandwagon without actually having seen the film, the rats have finally seen it. And . . . they regret to announce that they actually enjoyed it. It goes without saying that the liberties Fennel takes with the source material are friggin galling. But, if you imagine the book doesn’t exist and the movie is its own thing, it’s actually kind fab. Charmingly imperfect, shaggy and weird. Etc. Also also, as we nose dive into the pit together in this global ‘polycrisis’ one of the rats bemoans an especially vexing symptom of shared psychosis, which seems to be pettiness and horizontal violence of the embarrassingly transparent kind (the jealous kind).

Finally, these millennials wonder aloud and despair at the reported chastity of the younger generations, who apparently don’t have the restless libido of the older kids. Maybe it’s related to 5G, or microplastics, or labubus, or fidget spinners, or how The End of Everything is actually kind of a boner killer and makes you wanna bury yourself alive in a cosy hole in the ground, or drift out to sea on a one man raft with a case of wine and an eight kilo bag of trail mix. Who can say.

Enjoy some delicious and piping hot KFD with us at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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This week the rats are cinephiles and snap review The Moment, which they were lucky enough to see an advance screening of at Avondale’s illustrious Hollywood Theatre. The verdict? A not quite scathing enough meta-comedy about the cultural death of mass entertainment, and the slaughter a certain level of fame does to an artist’s integrity, when they’re willing to make potentially damning compromises in exchange for the meteoric success of, say, someone like Taylor swift; who arguably never had artistic integrity (in as much as being a teenaged country music star is the same as being a Hitler Youth pin up) and who Charli (maybe) specifically targets in her spoof of arena spectacles. The overt jabs at Coldplay are also very very welcome.

Also, the rats get nostalgic and remember a bygone era through fondly recalled affordable fragrances—Diesel, Gucci Rush, and something called Strawberry that had a very exciting bottle for a scent close enough to Cool Charm as to be indistinguishable, which might’ve been its age-specific appeal (simple aromas for unsophisticated palettes; the rats can’t relate). And we’d be remiss not to extend a shout out to maverick branding exercise Herbal Essences, whose fantasias of aromatic brunettes in orgasmic toilette was something of a cornucopia of marketing finesse, introducing the concept of the female orgasm to the misogynist masses for whom the very notion of female pleasure (independent of a cock) was quite foreign.

Finally, the rats bemoan the recent insanity of a school sports day getting marched on by a bunch of grumbling terfs for whom trans kids playing a bit of girls cricket (or whatever happens at school sports days) was inexplicably alarming. Like, why do you care so much about teenage bodies? Why not just get I HEART JAILBAIT tattooed to your forward. Either way these predators hiding their voyeuristic tendencies behind generic and flimsy moralism is getting reeeeeeal old real quick.

Reminisce the redolence of a time gone by with us at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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So many things to be disappointed by, so little time. At the top of the list this week is Gaga’s murky position on Israel, because we think the lady doth NOT protest as much as she could be protesting. Being an ally of white gays is a serviceable pass up to a point, and that point is most definitely conspicuous silence on a very visible genocide lol. Another visceral disappointment in this wicked world is the cops recently being given the authority to shuttle homeless people out of the CBD into . . . where exactly? Maybe they’ve colluded with CERN and opened portals to various mirror worlds where the unhoused can start new lives, so long as they can figure out how to negotiate inverted matter and make treaties with inter dimensional beings that (allegedly) want to harvest their energies. Or something. Some things that the rats are not disappointed by this week include the pending Scary Movie sequel, because Anna Faris and Regina Hall are as big a part of millennial cultural memory as 9/11 and the iPod.

Also, the final Splore, which Johanna attended, and which we spend a good time celebrating as the very good time it actually was, and which ultimately exists as another disappointment, because it’s our government’s fault the beloved festival is no more; apparently the funds it needed to continue went, instead, to supporting an NZ stop on American pop-punk band Linkin Park’s world tour. Sans Chester Bennington obviously, who ‘committed suicide’ about a decade ago; who, at round about the same time, was making a documentary about human trafficking that may or may not have come close to the darkling realities outlined in the Epstein Files, and whose collaborators (including Avici) have all also mysteriously passed away. So totally not suspicious at all lol.

Visit a mirror world with us at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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Soooooooo everything’s totally cool and normal right now aye, like definitely so chill that anxiously masculine influencers are looksmaxing which is another way of saying trying to look even more European than they already do, making mogging and the like a kid-friendly introduction to eugenics and nazi aesthetics, which probably has absolutely nothing to do with a male loneliness epidemic engineered by Epstein and cabal, which probably also has nothing to do with the fact Clavicular (like Andrew Tate but skinnier and more gay) is both microdosing meth to keep his weight down (similar to nazis, who were massive tweakers) and being sugar-babied by none other than Evil White Gay Peter Thiel whose heinous tech company Palantir introduced automated racial profiling to the world (among other things); and the fact that Theil is in the cabal as per The Files is also another complete coincidence and certainly not some terrifying sign of coordinated steps in an oligarchic sequence of popular white supremacy with the endgame of unleashing the peasantry on each other to thin the population and distract immiserated masses (literally you and me) from the incremental replacement of capitalism (bad enough) with techno feudalism (patently worse and already here). So yeah, like I said, so cool and normal. With everything being so cool and normal the rats still find some interesting things to chat about.

Like; the great national mystery of the missing Māori economic base, which David Seymour definitely thinks has nothing to do with historic treaty swindles; and, the difference between psychosis and hypoxia, because so many people these days are experiencing one or the other, and it’s important to know your malady; and, the private fear that Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights might actually be, well if not good then campily enjoyable. What a time to be alive.

Looksmaxx with us over at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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Oh dear, it looks like we’ve been so desensitized to horror that full disclosure doesn’t mean diddly (doesn’t mean DIDDY) any more. Like, what even is happening with the Epstein Files? The rats don’t personally go in for annual bingo cards because they’re adults and not dead-eyed youths reducing every uncomfortable aspect of life to a game or meme trope, but that said, if either rat had a bingo card it would definitely not have had billionaire pedo cannibals on it. Never mind the fact they’re billionaire pedo cannibals who have either directly bankrolled or endorsed a live-streamed genocide, and that they are billionaire pedo cannibals our current government is not doing anything to distance us from. Like, I’m not keen on having America mining us or whatever, but I feel doubly not keen when the man behind the drill allegedly banged a child and then ate some of her (ALLEGEDLY). Feels like a no brainer tbh. Anyway…in this sort of Waitangi special the rats get nostalgic about the glass wares on the marae; a very specific type of cup that must’ve been part of some national standard at one time. Or a Briscoes sale. Likelier the Warehouse. Also; would Johanna ever fake her own death?

The answer is probably yes, but not for the reasons you’re thinking. And then, if only because they have to, the rats discuss the Super Bowl, that American ritual of sound and fury which obviously split into factions this year with Turning Point’s sub par alternative show, headlined by a geriatric pedo who at the very least hasn’t eaten anybody (that we know of). While the rats have a heated debate about whether the symbolism of a Halftime Show has any social or cultural impact whatsoever, the world burns more and more furiously, and every able body under the age of sixty wonders whether they’d go as far as snipping their own achilles heel to dodge the draft. You know, like Trump did.

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Welcome back to the gutter where the living ain’t easy and the joys of scraping by are . . . well, few and far between. But like, ‘community’. And like, ‘therapy’. Because while everything is on fire you can at least anaesthetise with self-care and yet another instalment of whatever the Kardashians are up to these days (*vomit sound). On the Kardashians, the rats revisit Kanye’s public apology for like, the last few years in which he identified as a Nazi and made songs about hitler, as well as rubbing shoulders with soft-cock fake-goth abuser Marilyn Manson, and a slew of albums which suffered not only from ironic fascism (???) but also lacked the glory of previous albums in which craft was the priority and not flaccid alt-right shock. Can we really forgive a balding bipolar has-been because, to quote his apology, he had a ‘head injury’ that made him think jews bad hitler good? Probs not tbh.

Also; clearly Nicola Willis is terrible at her job. But with one of her few credentials being in English and poetry, the rats wonder what a poet Willis used to write about. Did she subvert canon and use kiwi imagery steeped in the miseries of Sylvia Plath? (Think a pavlova drizzled in period blood). Or maybe she used staccato stream of consciousness, like an affluent Janet Frame, minus the flare or urgency (and talent). The rats can only guess without eyes on Willis’s actual work, but they have to assume she’s a better poet than treasurer because if not, the safest thing would be for this early work to stay buried lest it resurface as just another humiliation on an already long list; somewhere between disappearing boats, e-scooter fails, and a collection of Blazers so plain they’d make Margaret Thatcher look like Liberace.

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