set of 2 books printed by steidl "Hi, my name is Jimmy," a crow said to the boy, Jim Dine, when his parents took him to the zoo. The two Jimmys got connected by a secret link. "Lots of things scared me when I was a little boy but this scared me and it also...I understood it." The encounter with the bird was perceived by the boy as a mixture of fear, fascination and a deeper understanding of his unconscious world. The artist later transformed his remembrance into a fascinating series of black-and-white photos. Are they symbolic, profound, mystic or just pictures of beloved animals? An everyday unspectacular bird might appear to the beholder as a character of mythology, as a jester at the medieval court, as a strange messenger of a world behind the scenes. Jim Dine speaks to the birds, and the bird answers, because they are on intimate terms. "The winter in L.A. that year was kind of a "grey July". Diana and I lived at 234 Entrada Drive in January and February of 2001. These photographs are a memoir of what our eyes saw in our garden and when we walked to the Pacific Ocean. We also climbed into the Santa Monica Mountains on our bicycles, crossing Sunset Boulevard just where it goes into Pacific Palisades. We did this every day, winding our way through more L.A. suburbia till we reached the fire trail into the mountains (where wilder animals than us live). We hardly ever saw a neighbor to make up stories about. Our landlady was called Denise de Graf. She was ever vigilant about our comings and goings. I also think we lived just to the north of the late Christopher Isherwood's house but maybe I dreamt that. That winter all we thought about was our work and getting back to Paris." Jim Dine