In a year when an overwhelming amount of movies left me feeling widely indifferent, The Class — a French film called Entre Les Murs, or “Between the Walls,” in its native tongue — was one of only a few that truly satisfied. The setting here is confined to one building (an inner-city Parisian high school) and one classroom, and our vantage point for this story never changes. After some time, this makes sense: The only characters we need to meet are the people who show up to class every morning, not the ones who go home. It’s this lack of an aerial view that director Laurent Cantet uses to effectively situate you in the only position where this story makes complete sense — in the trenches of Monsieur Marin’s French class, right there with the rest of them.

• DOWNLOAD | THE FIELD “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” Yesterday and Today, 2009

I have been missing in action, yes. Don’t all grown men need time to write their final term papers? In the meantime, some new music by The Field. Axel Willner’s new album, Yesterday and Today, will be released here in America on May 19, through a bizarre partnership between by Kompakt and Anti — bizarre, of course, because it would have never occurred to me that Brett Gurewitz cared about ambient techno. (That someone at Kompakt might like Rancid wouldn’t surprise me.)

“Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” is a cover of the oft-referenced Korgis single from 1980, which was seemingly perfected by Beck and Jon Brion for the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack in 2004. Unexpectedly, this version rings as more true to the movie: dawdling, hypnotic, anxious in the way that an addict who can’t stop scratching himself might relate. You can totally imagine Jim Carrey losing his mind to it.

Photo: The Field Museum Library

• DOWNLOAD | Trentemøller “Prana” The Last Resort (Expanded Edition)

Jeremiah Moss over at Vanishing New York has a little write-up this morning about Gus Van Sant’s upcoming movie, Howl, which is being filmed here in New York as we speak. After admitting that he once kissed Allen Ginsberg — “a wet, full-lipped, slightly scruffy kiss” — Moss expresses his displeasure over James Franco being cast in the role: “He just doesn’t say ‘queer, balding, Jewish nerd’ to me. He’s James Dean, only skinnier.” Agreed.

But the part of his story that took me down memory lane came towards the end, when Moss takes inventory of Ginsberg’s East Village haunts:

I guess I just miss Allen. I used to run into him at Prana Foods on First Avenue, rummaging through the bins of bruised vegetables. You might have seen him in one of the Polish and Ukrainian joints, in Kiev or the B&H. You never knew where, but he was around.

This is true. A little over ten years ago, I wrote about Allen Ginsberg for a column in Punk Planet, in which I mulled over the year I met him. It was 1993, and while I knew “who Allen Ginsberg was,” I didn’t know what Allen Ginsberg looked like. The following is an edited excerpt from that column.

¶

When I was 19 years old, I managed a small health food store in the East Village called Prana Foods. Saturday mornings were always my favorite day in the store, most likely because I was left alone. New York City’s health food elite generally eat organic to compensate for all the drugs and alcohol; these people don’t usually do their shopping until well after noon.

Of the few people who regularly came in, I remember only two: One was a short, older lady who dressed in rags. She always tried turning her food stamps into cash by purchasing a half a carrot every hour: if the carrot was 35 cents, I would have to give her 65 cents in change. I could have kicked her out, but it was a good scheme and I appreciated her creativity. The other customer was an older man who kept a beard and always appeared elegantly disheveled. He had a wry sense of humor — the kind where you could only identify the punchline if he smirked. That was my cue to laugh, and I did.

The first time we spoke, he commented on the Hare Krishna neckbeads I used to wear. He told me that he’d been to India, and that he’d met “the Swami.” A lot of people in the East Village have that story. If you lived here in the sixties, you were probably the kind of person who wanted to hang out barefoot on the muddy banks of a river with a dreadlocked Sivaite. I never thought to ask for the man’s name, but I recognized him and we continued our conversation for months after that.

One day, he came in while Alison was working. Alison was in charge of produce, but she generally didn’t need to be in the store until noon. The old man usually strolled in at 9 A.M., but on this day, he showed up much later than that. We carried on for a bit, like we usually did, before I finally rung him up. Occasionally, when older people came into the shop, I’d run them discounts or let certain, more expensive items go. He always noticed my gesture and thanked me enthusiastically before walking out.

As he left, Alison walked up to the register with her left eye cocked.

“You’re friends with Allen Ginsberg?”

I had no idea.

Ginsberg never seemed to revel in his celebrity. He bought his oatmeal, paid in cash, and actually showed less of a sense of entitlement than most of our customers. I like to think that he talked to me because he knew something that I didn’t — that is, remarkably, who he was.

Even now, I’m still not sure of that. What I do know about Allen Ginsberg, I like: In 1956, during a poetry reading, one heckler shouted, “What do you mean, nakedness?” — to which Allen responded by shedding his clothes. In 1974 a pair of muggers attacked him in front of his East 10th Street apartment. Ginsberg, a practicing Buddhist since the early ’70s, began incessantly chanting the Sanskrit mantra “Om” until the muggers screamed, “Shut up or we’ll kill you!” — apparently while running away. (This still works, trust me.) And best of all, when Ginsberg realized that his work was producing more income than he had ever thought possible, he legally turned himself into a non-profit organization, giving away countless dollars to people that, he felt, needed it.

The problem with all of this, I guess, is the fact that I barely knew any of it when I stood within inches of the man. I’d almost feel cheated if I didn’t like the little man with the beard who met “the Swami” so damn much. I’m sure Allen Ginsberg was great, but this man was special.

Photo: Pierodemarchis