endless stateless

Categories: Gallery
Travel Blog - May 2026.
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2026-05-19 - Athens.
Pre-departure dinner in Exarcheia. My mate Tony explains that his friend hanging around nearby has been banned from Olympiacos games after a cop was killed at one a few years ago and has charges over his head ever since. We discuss the odds of Olympiacos winning Euroleague. It rains. Weird spring in Athens.

Back home I am packing for tomorrow's 6:55 flight. Leave for the airport around 4am.
Picture: staving off malnutrition.

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2025-05-20 - 11,000m over Europe.

I am basically a professional tourist at this point, willing to go most places for the most vague of reasons. And if I were a pro I'd have the worst middle ear in the business - I could get motion sickness standing still in my own bedroom. Nowadays to plane, boat or bus I have to take a promethazine to suppress the nausea and then a caffeine tablet to suppress the drowsiness of the promethazine. If I'm lucky the caffeine overpowers the promethazine's ability to turn one into a imbecile and an asshole after getting off the plane. But not always. It can get a little short tempered and hazy.

But I'm still a better traveller than most. I blitz through security checks with my backpack packed top down for fluids and devices out in a moment. My ID and my passport in one wallet for rapid transit. A sim card ejector and little sealed baggie for all the spare sims in beside the passport. I have a sling bag that fits my phone, my pill case, passport and eBook reader, earbuds and still can rotate out of sight when I'm in the exit row where you can't take bags - unless theyre strapped to your body where the steward can't see.

The middle ear means I can't listen to anything in flight without getting nauseated - the earbuds are for the dead time in the airports. I haven't been able to watch inflight movies with sound for years. I can often be the only awake person without earbuds or headphones in on a flight, quietly reading, like it's the goddamn 1950s or something. This flight it's Naked Lunch. I blow the font up extra large hoping the obscene anal sex/gallows hanging scene offends someone but alas, nobody has ever noticed. I often read Burroughs on planes - the fragmentary and disjointed nature of air travel suits the texts. (Though my tip is that if you want a real inoffensive page turner that makes the time fly by try RL Stevenson. Treasure Island or Kidnapped - that guy can write!)

Watching snatches of movies without sound is a particularly rewarding experience. Almost all films on flights are atrocious, so lend themselves to being reinterpreted without sound. It was Brakhage who said that he and a friend would go see any movie and try to redeem it, no matter how terrible, by what Burroughs would call a ''creative reading' - screwing up their eyes or watching through a bottle of liquid, reducing it to nothing but moving colour and appreciating it for that. (I once reinterpreted a Transformers film this way.) On flights I will often watch, say, a Marvel film with no idea who the characters are or what their relationships are, and try to discern from the action alone what those relationships could be. I've never been disappointed with my superior sense of plot or storytelling when someone explains the intended story to me. (Black.Widow is rescuing her dad from prison because her mother is dying, she knows her inheritance hinges on him being able to fraudulently witness the fake will she has drawn up and hidden away. They have cut a deal where once he has signed the papers she will helicopter him to a desert island where he will live out his days as bearded king of the monkeys. She founds a cosmetics empire and loses it all when her transphobic Tweets sees her customer base evaporate overnight. See? That's way better.)

I'm also usually awake (caffeine) and can often be the only one doing that, too. I've managed to sleep on planes maybe five times and have usually.pulled 36+ hours no sleep when I've had terrible departure times (I.e., Australia->anywhere, anywhere->Tbilisi/Yerevan which have the worst flight times in the world for some reason) which is as hell as you'd imagine. This flight had a 6am boarding, which meant i was up at 3:30 and in a cab at 4:25 and just about everyone on here with me is out to it. In my head I am a 160cm/45kg woman who can curl.up in a plane seat and carry a week's clothing and shoes in a 20L backpack, but in reality I barely fit in the damn seat widthways let alone pull a stunt like that. (I know I'm not trans because this reality is just inconvenient and vaguely intellectually interesting to me and not distressing - but maybe i qualify as non-binary? But maybe i don't because I don't feel strongly enough that either. Sadly, I do not find gender particularly personally compelling and mostly just something written on my passport - like nationality and name.) Instead I'm in the leg room seats with a 30L carry-on, a hidden sling bag and a 'personal item' the same size as my backpack but that looks smaller. Probably. I get away with it by looking like I know what I'm doing, which may be the secret to most things. If you can fake both competence and sincerity you'll achieve a lot in life.

There's a passenger on here - and there's always at least one - who dropped luggage while ascending the gangway stair and didn't notice and then backed everyone behind her back down while she descended to get it, then tried to find her seat by staring at Google Maps (I can see what she was thinking there, but no, that doesn't work) and who just came back from the toilet with her phone torch on at full blast, swinging it from side to side as she searched for her seat. It's 9am, full sunlight. She's just intent on blinding her fellow passengers, I guess. Not sure if this is one of the many strange manifestations of flight anxiety or she just has a coconut for a cranium. These are the kinds of scenes you encounter when you travel a lot.

I've now been airborne for two hours and awake for about 22 of the last 24hrs, so I'd better eat one of those snack bars before the promethazine makes me totally incoherent/enraged.
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2026-05-21 - Tangier.
At Cafe Centrale in Petit Socco. Beside two guys dressed like gay cowboys, one wearing a ToPY earring both with elaborate facial hair. Round the corner are two guys, one in a Neubauten shirt. No matter where I go there I am.

(Later)

Ended up talking to my new mates, opening with "You guys gotta be going to Joujouka, right?" and wound up chatting for 2hrs. They're training up tomorrow, one has been before c.2017. Only positive things to say about it.

Now at Cafe Baba, made famous by everyone - can see why. No idea why life outside this exists. The tea is obscenely sweet.

Yesterday I clocked into the Muniria, in Room 1, no famous residents as far as I know. The rooftop rooms were occupied by various Beats and Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch on the ground floor, currently under reconstruction. Wandered the streets for a few hours, made some audio recordings, took some.photos. it's shocking how much of the Old Tangier is still here and how small it is. From the Muniria to Burroughs' favourite cafes is a ten minute walk. From his first semipermanent home, Tony Dutch's male whorehouse, to the Tingis cafe is literally a five metre walk in the Petit Socco. (Which translates to Little Boy, not incidentally.)

Cafe Baba absolutely lives up to its reputation as a hash bar, by the way.

(Later)

Took a photo walk this afternoon after Cafe Baba, got offered hash and 'good weed' about ten times. Some alleyways smell like piss and open sewers, some smell like dust and stonework, some smell like cooked sugar. One entrance to the Marshan off the port entrance, near Hotel Continental, featured touts selling caramel slice off giant trays they carried on their shoulders. I don't know much about food poisoning, but...

Guardian of Joujouka's sacred flame, Frank, called me this afternoon pretending to be a credit card scam - first time I've ever spoken to him. His phone cuts out. And again. Eventually gave me some tips on surviving both Tangier and the Muniria. He knows the gay cowboys (not actually gay) from the Cafe Centrale, described them as 'great' and 'crazy'. Tomorrow I walk to Cinema Rif and catch a bus up to Joujouka. I'm told there's no running water - but there is a cell tower.

Tonight may be catching up with psychedelic cowboys to go to a bar. Or maybe they'll be 'horizontal' as one put it.
Pics:

Above: The view from the Hotel Muniria, aka Villa Delirium (Corso), home to WS Burroughs and birthplace of Naked Lunch ; my room at the Muniria not very changed since the 50s.


Above: Cafe Centrale, Cafe Baba, views from.


Above: In and around Grand Socco and the Marshan, Tangier.

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Journal 2026-05-28 - Tangier

Several days back from Joujouka, in Tangier, Gran Cafe du Paris.

Three days in the village with the Master Musicians of Joujouka, eating sleeping drinking Joujouka. Everyone rises late, eats a huge communal.meal, jams out Joujouka music, smokes kif, naps, eats a meal and then around midnight play for hours while Boujeloud dances and chases people with olive branches. I got permission to.record for personal use, came back with 9hrs of music. I woke early (no kif) and hung out in the Masters' building and was invited to listen to their loose informal jam sessions, watching them practice, play, repair instruments, make reeds, work through lyrics for songs. Several guests were invited to join in these sessions.

The festival is 40 tickets only. Perhaps just under half are repeat Joujoukanauts (just got informed of that term by the guys hanging out front here) so the crowd are *really* the ideal fans, willing to travel to North Africa, hours up into the Rif Mountains and stay in adobe houses without running water in the 40° heat and go with the Masters' lack of interest in schedule or program or running time.

While the Masters are about as steeped in modern countercultural mythology as it gets (it *starts* with Brian Jones, moves into Burroughs, Gysin, Genesis P-Orridge, which is about as mystical and mythological as the modern world can be) and the festival itself is not a music festival so much as a village festival adjacent to Eid, the actual experience is less of a cult rite and more like sleeping on the couch of Black Flag and watching them do soundcheck every night. Which is probably actually better. It was hard to even understand how Burroughs, in his suits, managed up there in the cave, clambering up the rock into Boujeloud's lair, or fitting him into the familiar dry grass of the fields around the stage and the occasional donkey wandering past.

But what is obvious just how powerful the music actually is. I have seen many hundreds of bands and the Masters are at the very top. The second night they were absolutely on fire, maybe as good as any band I've ever seen. The music can be extended almost indefinitely, one session this weekend lasting over two hours, and players can drop in and out as they like. Unlike the modern tradition of the recording being the definitive form of a song and the goal of the live performance being perfect reproduction of that definitive form, the Masters have the non-western, pre-industrial approach to performance, in which the presebt form of the song is the one that matters. With no set membership, no fixed time, no fixed form, no two gigs are ever the same.