The man in charge of preserving France's most famous cemetery wishes that Jim Morrison would just go away.
The former Doors frontman, who died aged 27 in 1971, is the main draw at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, eclipsing other famous denizens like Irish writer Oscar Wilde, Polish-born composer Frederic Chopin and French singer Edith Piaf.
For historian Christian Charlet, who is responsible for the upkeep of the graveyard's 70,000 tombs, the crowds who come to commune with their deceased idol are nothing but an expensive headache.
"We would like to kick out Morrison because we don't want him, he causes too many problems," he said in an interview. "If we could get rid of him, we would do it straight away, but unfortunately the Americans don't want him back."
On a sunny April afternoon, visitors of all ages milled around Morrison's simple marker, watched by a security guard.
It seems that even in death, the rocker has been a magnet for trouble. Before the guard was appointed, fans would converge at the gravestone to drink beer and smoke pot, or worse even, have sex among the tombstones in a macabre communion.
"People come here not to worship the dead, but think they can do what they want as if it was a rave party," fumed Charlet. "Tourists have no respect for anything."
As it prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary this month, the Pere Lachaise is more popular than ever. The necropolis draws 2 million visitors per year, a third of the 6 million who throng to the city's emblematic Eiffel Tower.
A vast park filled with spectacular sculptures, it is an oasis of tranquility on the edge of town.
It is also a fully functioning graveyard, with 100 staff in charge of burying the dead, restoring graves and pruning the 6,000 trees spread over a 110-acre hillside in northeast Paris.
That fact is sometimes lost on the crowds of tourists, who treat the place like an open-air shrine and litter tombstones with mementos, when they are not trying to break off stone fingers and other souvenirs to take home.
"It's a shame that all the old tombstones have names scratched into them," remarked German visitor Daniel Koestlin, 31, as he ambled down a quiet alley searching for Chopin.
Public fascination has been fueled by the legends surrounding the final resting place of writers Moliere, Marcel Proust and Honore de Balzac, opera diva Maria Callas and actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, to name but a few.
"I can't get close to these people when they're alive," said Marie-Christine Nanniot, a day tripper from Reims, explaining the lure of the famous.
Wilde's towering memorial, featuring a winged male deity by sculptor Jacob Epstein, is covered in purple lipstick marks. The figure's penis has been snapped off, presumably by a collector.
Even non-celebrities can attain cult status. The statue of Victor Noir, a dashing young journalist killed in 1870, has become a fertility symbol, its crotch rubbed to a brassy shine by women seeking to increase their chances of conceiving.
When it opened in 1804, the cemetery was shunned by Paris residents accustomed to being tossed into common graves.
The government of Louis XVIII tried to drum up interest by transferring to the site in 1817 the mortal remains of doomed lovers Abelard and Heloise, alongside those of Moliere and poet Jean de La Fontaine.
But it was only after Balzac featured Pere Lachaise in a key scene of his 1835 novel Le Pere Goriot that it became fashionable to buy a plot.
Memorials of every shape and size bear witness to the cultural diversity of the cemetery, which from the beginning took in Catholics, Protestants and Jews alike, breaking the Catholic Church's previous monopoly on mass burial sites.
There are monuments to the dead of World War II concentration camps, alongside the bullet-riddled Communards' Wall where 147 members of the Paris commune were shot in 1871 after their brief revolutionary city government was defeated.
For some relatives of the dead, the presence of tourists is a comfort rather than an inconvenience.
"It doesn't bother me at all," said local resident Manuela Eckes, 66, who visits her husband's grave once a week. "On the contrary, people should join in. It's nicer. Maybe for the dead too, it's nicer to have people around."
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist