Holiday Thoughts and Holiday Hours
It's about you, to be honest...
First, a quick note with respect to Toucan’s business hours in the next couple weeks:
Toucan will close at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, the 24th.
Toucan will be closed on the 25th and will reopen with regular hours for the rest of the week: Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, the 26th, 27th, and 28th.
We will then be closed on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, the 31st and 1st, and be open after that like nothing ever happened.
Allison and I have been thinking a lot about the fact that at this time last year, Toucan, in its unmediated form (i.e., not this newsletter), found itself in a certain kind of operational and geographical limbo, somewhere between the ad-hoc facility of 1) Allison’s and my dining room table and some storage units, and 2) what had been and would be a real-world, bricks-and-mortar, commercial interface between community and market.
Toucan, in that moment, it did not exist but for the knowledge and the relationships and the record-keeping, and whatever other intangibles, from the legal to the psychological—the spiritual, even—those things that make Toucan Toucan but without a Toucan to go to, without a Toucan in which to be.
We had hoped to be open for the holiday season last year, but the vagaries of construction delayed our opening until February of this year. Which is to say that we did indeed escape our four month purgatory and find ourselves today, this many months later at the end of the year, and as many of you know for having visited us at our new location at 1002 2nd Ave N, in a place enlightened, shall we say (literally, with LEDs abounding), reinvigorated, and established east of downtown for this next run (or flight, I suppose, to continue considering the analogous birds, from Toucan to Billings Industrial Revitalization District) of creative compulsion, community facilitation, and market access.
Allison and I closed on our purchase of Toucan on January 17, 2007, so in less than a month we will recognize reaching 18 years of ownership of this tropical bird (I stand by this as a metaphor). This proximity of the end of the year and the anniversary of our ownership, always sets me to thinking about what this thing we purchased is and means, metaphorically or not.
Toucan existed for 25 years before we bought it, so the business itself is more than 40 years old at this point, a legacy business in Billings, here longer than Toys-R-US or Bed Bath and Beyond or Pier One or Shopko or Future Shop (okay, Best Buy bought out Future Shop and is still around, but still, remember Future Shop—there was a store in Billings called Future Shop!—back when the bell of tech utopianism still had an optimistic ring), all of which lived and died while Toucan kept and keeps on flying (I know, enough with the “bird” wordplay, or is it...birdplay? No. No. Stop it!). I often wonder, how does a place like Toucan exist in Billings?
A perennial question plagues Toucan, and it goes like this (and plague is much too strong a word): How do you choose the art and artists for this place? (Which is a legitimate question, but one hard to answer, as you will see.) Well, um, we pick things we like? Oh, what do you like? Well, um, we know it when we see it? This rhetorical stumbling doesn’t have anything to do with us not knowing how we pick the art and artists for Toucan, it has to do with the fact that, well, Toucan has become thoroughly us, our creativity and skills and knowledge and taste, in such a way as to not be easily analyzed, to not consist of so many discrete and digestible parts as to be extremely, achingly, whole. Like an ocean or a universe. Like bliss or grief. This is based on our many years of experience, not just owning Toucan, but before that, our collective years of working at being nothing less than who we are, everything we know and know how to do, and that, well...it’s hard to explain. Or as Irish essayist Brian Dillon writes of the essay but could just as well be writing about Toucan, if he knew Toucan existed: “The essay is diverse and several—it teems.”
Toucan, then, is something of a work of art in itself, and as such it serves as both reflection and shaper of the culture in which we find ourselves existentially immersed. By choosing the art we show and sell, by developing an aesthetic for the immediate place in which we operate, by overseeing a thin, if not fraught, boundary between beauty and commerce, Toucan manifests as something more than mundane, greater than the commonplace. At least that’s what we’re trying to do (even if it comes from a place more unclassifiable than clauses and commas can truly capture).
If art is a facilitator of culture, if it expresses the shared values, traditions, beliefs, and practices of a society in creative forms, and if Toucan is thus both vessel and engine for and of those creative forms, then what of community, a word so easy on the tongue but rarely contemplated from the distance of reason, with politics most often the culprit in polluting the stream of our consciousness, harshing the vibe, if you will, of our deliberate rumination on how we are together.
While culture, as those aforementioned shared principles and qualities, shapes a community’s identity, community itself is made up of human relationships. It contains, evolves, and sustains its culture through collective participation, shared experiences, and, hopefully, mutual support. As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of some remarks I made at a small dinner we hosted on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Allison’s and my ownership of Toucan in 2017. Amazingly enough, I was able to find those very words gathering digital dust in the corner of some cloud-storage attic space and they went, in part, like this:
Toucan represents a weird sort of dialectic, as a philosopher might call it. Where you have a thesis and an antithesis from which you develop a synthesis which represents some kind of truth. For the purpose here, a thesis that we’ll call money (because we have to make a living), and an antithesis that we’ll call art (because life is, or should be, beautiful and meaningful, and beauty and meaning are priceless). And the synthesis of those two things, I would argue, in terms of Toucan, at least, is people.
Because a place like Toucan, which is very small and dedicated to something very specific [even if, or because, it teems, I can’t help adding, this many years later, from outside of this quoting of myself] it ends up connecting people. It is a generator of community.
Which is what I want to emphasize here: Toucan is a community, as much if not more than it is a business. It’s a fellowship of shared interests, attitudes, and goals in this specific place that is Billings, Montana. We’ve met so many great people over these last 18 years and honestly, that’s what matters most to us. Because we realize that in the end, all we really have are the people close to us.
You see, Allison and I are just two people who make pictures, a painter and a photographer, who somehow ended up owning this thing called Toucan in our hometown. And as we’ve come to this synthesized realization regarding people, I want to extend this resultant truth even further, because maybe it’s not even a community that Toucan is, maybe it’s some kind of weird extended family that we all are, and maybe that’s why it resonates even more at this time of year, when the pot on the stove renders all the dysfunction, angst, and love into an ad hoc stew of hot, but likely lukewarm by the time you get there, organized concern. All I know is that Toucan is you as much as it is us, because without all of us, it just doesn’t happen. Toucan doesn’t exist.
While I might be motivated to bring Marx into the mix when writing about these sorts of things, I’ll leave Karl out of it—although his, “the increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world,” is not without merit—and wish everyone in the Toucan family happy holidays, however it is you might celebrate, hope you can curl up with a good book in the next few days, and leave the last words to Groucho: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”