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By the end of 2019, Dave Alvin knew something was wrong. He’d spent 11 of the past 12 months on the road, and for the first time in his career, he no longer felt physically capable of keeping up his furious touring pace.

“I started feeling like, ‘I don’t think I can do this anymore,’” Alvin says. The following month, in January 2020, he was hospitalized for nine days with a sepsis infection. By the next month, Alvin was feeling just barely good enough to perform at a benefit tribute show for...

Being known for being unknown is a bit of a booby prize, but over the course of 35 years, the British multi-genre-punk band the Mekons has managed to make underachieving a heroic ideal. After recording more than 20 albums, what began as a bit of an art-school lark evolved into something stirring, earning the band a star turn in Joe Angio’s documentary, Revenge of the Mekons, which is screening at Film Forum for two more days.A few of the esteemed devotees they’ve picked up over the years gathered last Thursday night in a Columbia University auditorium for an Ivy League symposium: Novelist Jonathan Franzen, critic Greil Marcus, American Psycho director Mary Harron, nonfiction writer Luc Sante, and artist and architect Vito Acconci gave readings on the band after a screening of excerpts of the film, while band guitarist and singer Jon Langford sat among them, offering a song about...