...she walked a crooked mile...

While I was in San Francisco last month I never made it to Lombard Street. This makes me a little sad. I became a bit obsessed with it several years ago when I was there visiting my friend Colleen, who was already a fan. We drove down it many times that trip. Though I got carsick on another occasion (and, as it turns out, I have been carsick every! time! I've gone to San Francisco), it was never during a spin down Lombard Street.

I am currently also preoccupied by pictures of Lombard Street, and there are plenty of artists who fuel my ardor.

Ellie Marshall, 1987:



John Kraft, 2004:



Helga Strobel and Diggory (Colleen sent me this postcard):



Even a Limoges box!



900 Lombard Street is also, of course, the address of Scottie, Jimmy Stewart's character in the phenomenal Vertigo, which I absolutely need to watch again:


(Outside the apartment, looking away from the crookedness)

Stewart doesn't do much for me as a romantic lead, but check out this "Rescue at the Golden Gate Bridge" shot. Kim Novak can swoon like nobody's business:



Yarnstorm's reflections here about collecting things really struck a nerve with me. (It's probably easy to tell that her whole blog, graceful and stylish, is having a tremendous influence on my own blogging style, if I can even presume to have one in my second post, for goodness sake.) It works in the abstract too, I think--before I started writing this post, I never thought I'd go here, but I'm starting to realize some of the pull of Lombard Street: it looks like my life recently. I mean, just look at all the present participles up there in my "description" subheading. Certainly they're related, but in a way that keeps one tacking back and forth all the time. I'm just starting to get used to it, but I want to bring things in line a bit more, straighten out the path. I've been spending most of the past month digging out from under the detritus of the past two years--three, really, if you count the year of pregnancy/first year of a permanent job. I'm hoping I can use this space to reorganize my mental storage area a bit, so that next year my life is a little less like this:


(Peter Lee Brownlee)

and a little more like this:


(Road and Telegraphic Poles. East Yorkshire. 1 IV '04. David Hockney, 2004.)

A girl can dream.