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Senior year of high school my friends and I recreated this video for our final project in Spanish class. We weren’t quite sure what was going on in the video then, and to this day I’m still not very certain. In our low-budget remake, we jumped out of a cardboard box and sprayed milk all over my parents’ backyard. The neighbors, I can only imagine, were dumbfounded.

I present to you, as a service to Google and befuddled viewers, a transcription of the video, unedited:

Bonjour, Good Morning

Is now for the first time

Dalí born

with any kind of traumatism

A little blood,

symbolic blood

And milk,

again milk of today born

and some symbolic fish

of Mediterranean people

This is the blood of Gala …

…and the blood of the Divine Dalí

[scene]

The scene went down recently here in Pilsen.

Wear silly vests and hard hats, and film it all on fancy DSLRs.

Have one person do all the work, and everyone else mill about and record the momentous event. Not suspicious at all.

Oh, no! The fuzz! How did they find us?

Oh, man, our progressive culture jamming is SHUT DOWN by the police!

Be certain, however, to record the heartbreaking takedown of the sign from multiple angles. This will play great on YouTube later.

The sign that could have changed the world: "Danger: You are 0.5 miles from the Fisk coal fired power plant."

Despite looking really silly trying to hang a fake sign, these folks do have a good cause. The Fisk Generating Station is a coal-fired power plant on Cermak Road, here in Pilsen. It’s a relic of a bygone era of power generation, and is a public health nightmare. Community groups have been trying for the past decade to shut down Fisk, to almost no success. The 25th alderman, Danny Solis, doesn’t appear to be championing the cause, and is in the pocket of Midwest Generation, the owners of the station.

The Chicago Reader has a number of good articles on the subject, including recent efforts by the Chicago Clean Power Coalition to push ordinances through Chicago City Council to regulate and shut down the plants.

• “Speaking of Clean Air” from December 2005.
• “The latest salvo in the fight to clean up Chicago’s air” from July 2009.
• “Something in the air” from March 2003.

ChicagoBusiness.com reports that, as  of April, there’s a new ordinance being pushed by a coalition of aldermen and civic organizations. Let’s hope that Chicago politics don’t get in the way of public health.