Rats In The Gutter

Sam Te Kani & Johanna Cosgrove

Auckland, the Babylon of Australasia. Home to award-winning creatives/ aspiring Jezebels Sam Te Kani and Johanna Cosgrove. Join them as they navigate daily life in a gorgeous South Pacific necropolis here at civilization’s end. Not deterred in the least by back-to-back lockdowns and a shortage of worthwhile intimacies, Te Kani and Cosgrove barrel headfirst into themes and experiences any modern twenty-something will recognise. From finding love when every other guy is a flakey bisexual, to the ego disorders of our noted socialites, and minor takeout addictions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. Bartleby The Gooner

    2 DAYS AGO

    Bartleby The Gooner

    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 a forward-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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    47 min
  2. The Blizzard

    14 MAY

    The Blizzard

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    59 min

  3. 8 MAY

    Rerun: FEATURING EMMA GLEASON

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    57 min
  4. Rerun: Gayz In The Gutter: Live

    30 APR

    Rerun: Gayz In The Gutter: Live

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    45 min

  5. 23 APR

    RERUN: Vices

    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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    50 min
  6. Vigorous Thai Fingers

    13 APR

    Vigorous Thai Fingers

    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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    47 min
  7. Throbs and Leaks

    23 MAR

    Throbs and Leaks

    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 c*m 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    49 min
  8. Chaste

    15 MAR

    Chaste

    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 b***r 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    47 min
See All (130)

5
out of 5
38 Ratings

About

Auckland, the Babylon of Australasia. Home to award-winning creatives/ aspiring Jezebels Sam Te Kani and Johanna Cosgrove. Join them as they navigate daily life in a gorgeous South Pacific necropolis here at civilization’s end. Not deterred in the least by back-to-back lockdowns and a shortage of worthwhile intimacies, Te Kani and Cosgrove barrel headfirst into themes and experiences any modern twenty-something will recognise. From finding love when every other guy is a flakey bisexual, to the ego disorders of our noted socialites, and minor takeout addictions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Sam Te Kani & Johanna Cosgrove
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    130
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Little Empire Podcasts
  • Show Website
    Rats In The Gutter

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