Bits: 07.28.09

A postered-over recycling bin by the German street-art collective Mentalgassi

• Video: Mentalgassi at work in Berlin.

• Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei is now being monitored by authorities for his work that's critical of the government, including a recent project in which he posits that deaths from the May '08 Sichuan earthquake were exacerbated by local officials who skimmed funds intended for school construction. He and his family have been hassled by plainclothes cops, and his blog at Sina.com has been shut down (he started a new Chinese-language one here).

• Tod "Sucka Pants" Seelie (of Miss Rockaway Armada fame) is bicycling through Indonesia. Follow along on Flickr.

• The cataclysmic filming of Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, chronicled well in Les Blank's must-see documentary Burden of Dreams, is now retold in grueling detail in Herzog's new book Conquest of the Useless. Unlike Blank's film, writes Flavorwire, this diary penned during filming "reveals the inner struggles and pitiless frustration of the sinking ship’s stubborn captain."

• Juxtapoz interviews Minneapolis design trio (apparently, they recently added Jonathan Shuster) Aesthetic Apparatus.

• Tyler Green covers the next potential threat to Smithson's Spiral Jetty, the proposed expansion of evaporation pools in the northern end of the Great Salt Lake.

• The Damien Hirst-designed bike for Lance Armstrong's Stages project with Trek is the best yet -- butterflies -- but I'm starting to think bikes aren't the best canvasses for 2D works by visual artists.

• Via Utne, a devastatingly intimate portrait of grief.

• Charles Bukowski gives a tour of Hollywood (1985).

• An analysis of 2,400 graffiti tags in Paris in April shows the diversity and prevalance of certain letterforms.

• A truly bizarre story of a Japanese man's love affair with a stuffed pillowcase.

• William Shatner performs Sarah Palin's farewell speech.