Despite a lifelong obsession with politics and music, I only really learned about Victor Jara because of Professor Joe Strummer. “Please remember Victor Jara, in the Santiago stadium,” the late, lamented Clash bard quietly intoned in “Washington Bullets,” and I had to find out what he meant. Jara, the Chilean singer-songwriter and pioneer of the nueva cancion movement, was tortured and murdered with many others following Pinochet’s CIA-supported 1973 military coup on September 11, 1973.

Earlier this month, 36 years after his death, thousands convened in Santiago to give Jara a proper funeral, following a new autopsy that confirmed his torture and murder. Attendees included Jara’s widow, Joan Turner, and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, whose own father was among the junta’s victims. It’s belated poetic justice that Pinochet died in infamy as one of the world’s most disgraced public figures, while the boxing stadium where Jara lost his life is now known as Victor Jara Stadium. The next time you’re looking for a profile in courage, consider the poem fragment Victor Jara penned in the boxing stadium moments before his execution, and after his hands had been broken:

To see myself among so much
and so many moments of infinity
in which silence and screams
are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment…

Because Victor Jara’s recordings aren’t widely heard in this country, his role in progressive iconography has long eclipsed his earlier fame as a singer-songwriter. But as his discography and a handful of video clips confirm, he had a wonderful voice. A couple of his better-known songs are in the clips below. After the click-through are just a few of the songs he’s inspired, featuring Calexico, Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, Claudia Acuna, Inti-illimani (and, please remember, the Clash).

Victor Jara, “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz”

Victor Jara, “Te Recuerdo Amanda”

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Since Thanksgiving weekend gives us all the chance to dwell on the huge chasm between the Norman Rockwell expectations and Jackson Pollock realities of our everyday lives, it’s all too easy to make it an occasion to break out the Schopenhauer and wallow in self-pity. That’s what makes it the perfect time to pay homage to one of the unsung heroes of Western philosophy, Ian Dury. A new biography and forthcoming film may signal a Dury renaissance as we near the tenth anniversary of his passing.

Dury is best known as the post-Freudian theorist who identified the three things a brain and body needs. He contracted polio as a child and passed away in 2000 at age 57. He was human and needed to be loved, just like Morrissey and everybody else does.

But Dury never played the victim, since he was too busy finding little sources of delight in the surreal and debauched spectacle that is real life. As the missing link between Benny Hill and Bertrand Russell, Dury had ingenious ways to find the sublime in the ridiculous. His backing band, the Blockheads, stayed tight and funky in an era better known for its sloppy chaos. His manifesto, “Reasons to Be Cheerful, Part 3″ finds all sorts of wonderful reasons to keep on keeping on. No Thanksgiving toast I could devise could compete with that song’s “Too short to be haughty, too nutty to be naughty/ Going on 40 – no electric shocks.” And the reasons keep getting better from there:

Bantu Stephen Biko, listening to Rico
Harpo, Groucho, Chico

Cheddar cheese and pickle, the Vincent motorsickle
Slap and tickle
Woody Allen, Dali, Dimitri and Pasquale
balabalabala and Volare

Something nice to study, phoning up a buddy
Being in my nuddy
Saying hokey-dokey, singalonga Smokey
Coming out of chokey

John Coltrane’s soprano, Adi Celentano
Bonar Colleano

The BBC, which once upon a time was known to ban the occasional Dury ditty, now features a glossary of all Dury’s reasons to be cheerful. The song also inspired Dave Gorman’s one-act play, which supposedly presents research testing the validity of Dury’s reasons.

Need more reasons to love Ian Dury? He had the opportunity to adapt the lyrics for the musical Cats and turned down Andrew Lloyd Webber. As Dury explained while terminally ill: “But I said no straight off. I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber. He’s a wanker, isn’t he?… Every time I hear `Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ I feel sick, it’s so bad. He got Richard Stillgoe to do the lyrics in the end, who’s not as good as me. He made millions out of it. He’s crap, but he did ask the top man first!”

Ian Dury, “Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3″

The Fabulous Flippers: The Beatles and James Brown rolled into one in mid 60s Midwest: http://bit.ly/epaPg Really! (via @WineExpo)