Biblioklept is just a great site. Bookmark it.

Today gives Flannery O’Connor’s great story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

[Picture by Heinz Straeter via Lushlight]

Alexandra gives gluten-free peasant bread.

Darryl Pickney reviews a terrific book of photography for the New York Review of Books:

Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down.

Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy told me that at his corner of 124th Street and Lenox he once saw the garbage collectors in their truck nodding from heroin. They were parked for hours, the trash uncollected when they finally left. Delivery trucks at stoplights got held up. Sometimes a driver would be enticed by a woman to a room where he was then tied up. Down in the street, an orderly line was forming for the sale of his truck’s contents.

Drug money circulated fiercely. People could get shot in the middle of the afternoon and if you chanced to be on the street where it happened, you knew that you had seen nothing, heard nothing, and would say nothing. Many gave up because the streets and the schools were so bad, especially middle-class blacks who could at last go elsewhere. But jobs were plentiful in the city. If you didn’t like your boss, an old head told me, you could quit and have a new job by the end of the day. Some people had jobs as well as welfare. Blacks felt that they ran the place. You could pass out on a traffic island in Harlem and no one would bother you all day long. The only people around in those days were black, old heads say. If whites found themselves in Harlem, then they had to run. But you can meet whites who have spent their lives in Harlem, in their family homes, tolerated because they’d always been there, hadn’t run.

Buy Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto here.

The new documentary on Stones Throw Records. 

[Photo Via: Smart Shanghai]

“Cups” by Diebs [Via Bo Fransson]

Henry Chalfant at the Steven Kasher Gallery.

“The Cocktail Party” by Alfred Leslie (1967-78)

Grant Green Monday:

[Photo Credit: John Ciamillo]

It’s a spring thing. 

Michael Pineda’s looked good this spring. 

Final cuts coming soon.

[Picture by Bags]

 Sunday groove. 

[Photograph by Sophie Harris Taylor via like a field mouse]

[Photo Via: Ned Hepburn]

NCAA Hoops tonight and all weekend.

Have at it.

[Photo Credit: Joel Zimmer]

Finally Friday.

Serious Eats gives 26 Must-Eat Dumplings in NYC. 

Indeed.

“My Roof” By Edward Hopper (1928)

[Via the dope Tumblr site, Bo Fransson]

Dig this cool post from Messy Nessy Chic on the last Japanese mermaids (and heads up, there’s some nudity involved):

For nearly two thousand years, Japanese women living in coastal fishing villages made a remarkable livelihood hunting the ocean for oysters and abalone, a sea snail that produces pearls. They are known as Ama, and if you’ve dipped into Messy Nessy’s archives, you will have already met the few ladies still left in Japan that still make their living (well into their 90s) by filling their lungs with air and diving for long periods of time deep into the Pacific ocean, with nothing more than a mask and flippers.

In the mid 20th century, Iwase Yoshiyuki returned to the fishing village where he grew up and photographed these women when the unusual profession was still very much alive. After graduating from law school, Yoshiyuki had been given an early Kodak camera and found himself drawn to the ancient tradition of the ama divers in his hometown. His photographs are thought to be the only comprehensive documentation of the near-extinct tradition in existence.

The thaw has been gradual but it is supposed to be warmer today and warmer still tomorrow. Each night it stays light a little longer.

Ah, the light. C’mon Spring.

[Picture by Bags]

Okay, I’m reloaded. 

Some wild games in the NCAA tournament last night. And of course, the Yanks played too.

Mostly, they are concerned about the health of their new center fielder.

[Picture by Dave Bullock via West Coast Avengers]

We’re doing some technical stuff behind the scenes today so blogging will be light. Be back shortly with more Internet Fun.