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."
It starts out as a heartwarming clip. A young girl, clearly delighted to be in Tokyo, beams as she makes a peace sign to the camera. Seconds later, she is shoved to the ground from behind by a woman wearing a surgical mask. The assailant doesn’t skip a beat, striding out of shot of the clip filmed by the girl’s mother. This was no accidental clash of shoulders in a crowded place, but one of the most visible examples of a spate of butsukari otoko — “bumping man” — shoving incidents in Japan that experts attribute to a combination of gender
The race for New Taipei City mayor is being keenly watched, and now with the nomination of former deputy mayor of Taipei Hammer Lee (李四川) as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) candidate, the battle lines are drawn. All polling data on the tight race mentioned in this column is from the March 12 Formosa poll. On Christmas Day 2010, Taipei County merged into one mega-metropolis of four million people, making it the nation’s largest city. The same day, the winner of the mayoral race, Eric Chu (朱立倫) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), took office and insisted on the current
When my friend invited me to take a tour of a wooden house hand-built by a Pingtung County resident, my curiosity was instantly piqued and I readily agreed to join him. If it was built by a single person, it would surely be quite small. If it was made of wood, it would surely be cramped, dingy and mildewy. If it was designed by an amateur, it would surely be irregular in shape, perhaps cobbled together from whatever material was easily available. I was wrong on all counts. As we drove up to the house in Fangliao Township (枋寮鄉), I was surprised
Last month, media outlets including the BBC World Service and Bloomberg reported that China’s greenhouse gas emissions are currently flat or falling, and that the economic giant appears to be on course to comfortably meet Beijing’s stated goal that total emissions will peak no later than 2030. China is by far and away the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, generating more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. As the BBC pointed out in their Feb. 12 report, “what happens in China literally could change the world’s weather.” Any drop in total emissions is good news, of course. By
RSS