Quiet Melancholy

Sometimes I can't help but hear

The giant conversation

Of matters near and far.

Of laughter, despair and sadness.

Fires rage across California, rich and poor alike are lost in the fire, their houses burned away. What took generations to build -- the American Dream -- is gone in flames. And our Earth is scorched.

Gun violence kills 15,000 people a year in America, in our homes, churches and schools. Manufacturing and selling more guns does not bring peace. Do we really need to put guns in the hands of teachers?

I hear the voices of rage, despair and heartbreak. It's a dialog of 10,000 volumes of pain, fear and greed, the rise and fall of civilization.

What does this all mean? Who is right? Who is wrong? What does it matter?

Law enforcement cannot handle all the insanity in the world. 

We must renew ourselves to live in harmony with nature and humankind. Do no harm. Give peace a chance. Leave the world a better place. Aim to touch each person with loving kindness.

I embrace nature. My animal self. My spiritual self. I dance. Run. Hug someone. Create love. Because love comes back to me. Love begets love, hate begets hate. I don't want to be a hater, angry at the world all the time hating, hating, hating.

I would rather cultivate beautiful moments with people I admire. Start a universal conversation about love, art and music, of poets and philosophers, craftsmen and engineers, let's build something together, let's make it meaningful, useful and good.

In these luminous moments we transcend our madness and step into a loss of ego, carried away by the artist self, the sublime transcendent soul.

-Michael Hooper, Nov. 17, 2018

Night Rides

Michael Hooper and Emil Spaeth, The Brass Rail.

I should be tired but I cannot rest.

I decide I'm going for a bicycle ride. I check the bike lights, I check the tires, grab helmet, I'm good to go. This Surly Ogre never lets me down, this bike is tougher than me.

It's times like these that I break the pattern of regularity and go somewhere I've never been before, to meet people I've never met. Maybe I will go to a pub in the arts district.

I gather speed on 8th Street, loving this quick scream downhill stretch, propelling me ahead, in the streetlight darkness.

I pedal pass the old sanatorium grounds. Most of the State Hospital is gone except for the anonymous dead buried in the cemetery  -- silent reminders of our kept madness.

I wander through Potwin and look at the great mansions. I remember Halloween nights with a thousand children collecting pounds of candy at these stately homes. But tonight the neighborhood is quiet.

My bicycle rolls on, it seems to take off going downhill again, I just have to be super alert to avoid a crash. I concentrate intently on my way East on 1st Street all the way to Kansas Avenue

I turn north and head to NOTO Arts District

A few musicians are hanging around. I stop into J&J for a beer. Native American pride lives here.

I decided to ride to the Brass Rail. I took the Sardou Bridge. I look below by the river at little Russia.

I wander my way over to the Rail, lock up my bike and go inside where I see a couple friends in the light by the old wood bar.

There's Daryl Hendrix, Kerrice Mapes, Sally Glassman, Emil Spaeth, Charles Baylor. They make me smile just thinking about them.

Charles and I talk about the books we are reading, and look up at the Royals game.

A second beer hits me just right, I'm feeling the warm glow of the evening ambiance.

I go outside and sit next to a stranger, we have a connection, a conversation, a bond.

This is enough, this is beautiful man, how lucky are we to share in this moment.

We could hear the sound of a cheer as the Royals scored another run.

I check my sanity level, my dexterity, I feel okay, I think I can do this, I get back on the bike and start wandering my way home.

It's mostly uphill all the way, I peddle slowly yet the bike takes me fast along the street.

I see the darkened sky and the stars above. I roll gently. I am floating with the sky above the ground, the rolling wheels carrying me.

I rest at the Dutch Goose, for a final pint of the night. Many memories happened in this place. I fondly recall the bagpipes playing on Saint Patrick's Day.

I drink a PBR for a few minutes, then decide it's over. Time to ride the last mile uphill, it's the hardest part of the midnight journey.

I parked the bike in the garage, go inside the  house, it's quiet. The children are in their rooms asleep, I crawl into bed, my wife has been up reading but now is ready to close out the night. We kiss, Good night.

The colors of the night linger in my head as I drift off to sleep.

-Michael Hooper, Nov. 16, 2018

My Crying Trees

The blue canvas
the brilliant sky
the sun on my eyes.

Water dripping off my face.

A glorious engagement
with my lover. At the lakeside.
She looking so sensual.

But that is gone.
Summer is gone.

Oh, My Picasso, My Goya
My Guernica

My burning horses

My wilting flowers

My crying trees

My Howling nights

My quiet mornings.

I've been holding onto summer

Yet it's a cold November

Goodbye summer

It's about time

I rummage through
the library of my mind

To review Ginsberg, Thoreau
and Emerson

To Connect with my books,
my poems and my Picassos.

To live while much is left to die.

See the falling leaves

My crying Trees.

--Michael Hooper
Nov. 6, 2018

Why I sold Aurora Cannabis

By Michael Hooper

I recently sold all of my marijuana stocks and put all of the proceeds into Turning Point Brands (TPB). Pot stocks fell 30% after Canadian legalization October 17th, and Turning Point Brands is down just 1% since October 17th.

I think there will be future opportunities in cannabis stocks when they will be much cheaper.

But right now I go with my instinct that there was a bubble. On Oct 17, I felt a similar uneasiness when Bitcoin was at $15,000 in December 2017, and I sold the Bitcoin at $10,000 per coin before the price fell all the way to $6,200. I suffered from Fear Of Losing All My Gains and sold while I still had a nice profit.

When there's over buying and over exuberance there is usually high prices. I saw this in the land market in the Midwest with farm land selling for up to $10,000 per acre in 2012. Land prices later softened due to poor commodity prices.

In the book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds," the author Charles MacKay talks about some disturbing Trends in the human psyche on a mass scale. His book looks at The South Seas Bubble, The Mississippi Scheme and The Tulip Bubble, the Crusades, Witch Hunts and Alchemy. Let me throw in the 2000 Tech Bubble Crash and the Mortgage Crisis of 2008 that led to a 50% drop in the stock market; the 2017 Bitcoin Run Up to $19,000 and the Pot Market High of 2018.

Crowd hype is cheer leading, it's performed every day in business, sports and politics. Congratulations to the Boston Red Sox for beating the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, 4-1. 

Hype ebbs and flows with the crowds. Traders that I talked to were expecting a pot stock sell off around October 17th the day recreational cannabis became legal in Canada.

I watched a sell-off occur on October 17th as Canopy Growth hit $59 a share and then quickly retreated and fell into the low 40s and before you know it in a couple of days it was headed even lower, into the 30s. There was panic in the market. On October 22nd, I sold Canopy at 43. I had watched Aurora Cannabis (ACB) climb over $10 per share, but was sliding. I sold Aurora Cannabis at $9.50 per share.

Canopy and Aurora both fell 30% after I sold them. The same day I sold I also bought shares of Turning Point brands at $42.40 per share, the stock recently traded at $41.63, down 1.8%.

Turning Point Brands sells products such a Zig-Zag papers that serve the Cannabis Market but does not sell cannabis. Turning Point Brands is a consumer non-cyclical, my favorite type of company, it sells products like Vapes that people want every day of the year.

A hot seller in the Cannabis Market is cigar wraps. Turning Point Brands Zig-Zag brand sells cigar wraps that are immensely popular among smoking connoisseurs.

Turning Point brands also sells chewing tobacco like Beech-Nut and Stoker's, and Red Cap pipe tobacco and Zig-Zag Cigarillos.

In the electronic vapor Market the company's Vapor Beast and Vaporshark products are sold widely.

Own the Steady-Eddy everyday seller, and you will make money. I've had good luck owning tobacco stocks in the past and this company Turning Point Brands has only an $805 million dollar market cap compared to the market caps of these cannabis stocks like Aurora Cannabis (ACB) at $6 billion.

I like the strategy of Turning Point Brands: "Our growth will be driven by focusing on nurturing and growing our key Brands and sales Platforms in the tobacco, vapor and non-tobacco space, improving the efficiency of our operations, and expanding our capabilities and product breadth through additional Acquisitions and innovation."

Lawrence S. Wexler is president and CEO of Turning Point Brands. He previously worked 21 years for Philip Morris. TPB is a Louisville, Ky., company that can capitalize on this pot Market by selling papers and wraps to smokers.

Aurora Cannabis and Canopy Growth should be around a long time. They are well capitalized and will be growing operations rapidly. I will wait six months to see how the Cannabis sector looks. In the meantime, I have to make capital work for me, and for this, I put the money into Turning Point Brands.

Disclosure: The author owns Turning Point Brands (TPB) and may buy more shares under $40 per share.

Berkshire Hathaway: A Conviction Buy

By Michael Hooper

Looking at Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) over the past 25 years, I have paid close attention to its Price/Book Ratio. This is the price of the stock divided by its book value. Most banks trade around book value, which is assets minus liabilities. Berkshire Hathaway is not a bank nor a pure play financial company. It is a conglomerate with 100 different companies in insurance, transportation, energy, aviation, manufacturing and retail, plus a large portfolio of stocks like Apple (AAPL) and Coca-Cola (KO).

Over the past five years, Berkshire Hathaway's price to book ratio has ranged between 1.196 times book value to 1.58 times book value, with the average at 1.4 times book, according to Ycharts.

During the past 13 years, the highest P/B Ratio of Berkshire Hathaway Inc was 1.90. The lowest was 1.03. And the median was 1.35, according to GuruFocus.

Currently the price of Berkshire Hathaway Class A stock is trading around $300,000 per share, and the Class B Shares are $200 per share. The book value per share is $218,350 per class A share or about $145.56 for the B share at end of second quarter 2018.

$300,000/$218,350=1.373
B shares are worth 1/1500 of A share.

During my years of observation, Berkshire stock always seems to be a buy when it is trading around 1.3 times book value, the stock usually recovers to around 1.4 to 1.5 times book. If the stock were to recover to 1.45 times book value, the stock would trade at $316,607 per A share or $211 per B share.

In the Berkshire Hathaway owners manual, Warren Buffett talks about the important measure of book value and how it relates to the intrinsic value of the company. Buffett closely watches the intrinsic value of the company because he believes that is a true representation of the company's value.

He says intrinsic value is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out of a business during its remaining life. 

Buffett calls the book value figure as a "rough albeit significantly understated tracking measure for Berkshire's intrinsic value." A percentage change in book value in any given year is likely to be reasonably close to that year's change in intrinsic value. Buffett has been able to grow book value of the company at an average annual increase of 19% since he took over management of the company in 1965.

Last summer Berkshire Hathaway made its buy back policy more liberal to buy back shares trading above 1.2 times book value.

It wouldn't surprise me to see Berkshire Hathaway buy back shares below $200 per B share or below $300,000 per share on the A shares.

Third quarter earnings for Berkshire Hathaway will be hampered by hurricane damage, but I expect large gains in railroad, manufacturing, retail and energy.

Keep in mind, Price/Book value is just one way to measure a company. Price/Earnings ratio is a popular way to measure a company.

Currently Berkshire's P/E ratio is about 10.4. J.P. Morgan analyst Sarah DeWitt's B-share Dec. 2019 price target is $250, giving the stock about an 18% upside potential, according to this article at Seeking Alpha.

Disclosure: The author owns shares of Berkshire Hathaway, and recently purchased more shares of the stock, and may buy more below $200 per B share.

Isabella Stewart Gardner: An Obsession In Art

Isabella Stewart Gardner by John Singer Sargent.

By Michael Hooper

Isabella Stewart Gardner was an extraordinary woman for her day and time in America. She cultivated arts, culture and music in Boston during the late 1800s, early 1900s. She loved intelligent educated artistic men like Henry James, John Singer Sargent, F Marion Crawford, the writer. She was a leading American art collector, philanthropist and Patron of the Arts. She was founder of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, on the Fenway.

Isabella Stewart Gardner amassed a huge collection of art, letters and books through the late 1800s early 1900s in Boston. She was born in New York she was educated in Paris and married a wealthy Boston businessman at age 18 in 1860. They traveled extensively to Japan, Cambodia, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and spent much of their time in Venice, where she gathered ideas for her own museum. Heather and I visited her museum in September after I read her biography Mrs Jack by Louise Hall Tharp, which I discovered in a shop bookshelf in July in Pine River Minnesota.

Isabella Stewart was born in New York, April 14th 1840. she was the daughter of a wealthy linen Merchant David Stewart and Adelia Smith Stewart. She claimed her family tree could be traced to Scottish nobles.

Her family attended Grace Church in New York. When she was 16 years old family moved to Paris where Isabella was enrolled in a school for American girls and her classmates included the wealthy Gardner family of Boston. She stayed in contact with Julia Gardner of Boston. In 1857 Isabella was taken to Italy where she saw a collections of Renaissance art. She said at the time if she was ever to inherit some money she would create a similar house for people to enjoy.

Shortly after returning to New York her former classmate Julia Gardner invited her to Boston where she met Julia's brother John Lowell Jack Gardner. He was the son of John L and Catherine E Peabody Gardner, and one of Boston's most eligible bachelors. They married in Grace Church on April 10th 1860 and then lived in a house that Isabella's father gave them as a wedding gift at 152 Beacon Street in Boston they would reside there for the rest of Jack's life. They also had homes in Brookline and Beverly outside of Boston.

Jack and Isabella had one son but he died about 2 years later. She had a miscarriage and was told that she could not bear any more children. This development sank her into a depression. On the advice of her doctors she and Jack traveled to Europe in 1867. The couple spent almost a year traveling, visiting Scandinavia and Russia but spending most of their time in Paris. The trip was sort of a turning point in her life long habit of keeping scrapbooks of our travels. On page 49 we see Bella Gardner Illustrated her journal with watercolor sketches many of them remarkably good in all of them credible. She wrote in her journal during many a peaceful hour and sometimes watched Palm Groves in the early Moonlight letting her thoughts fly away with the mini white sailed caiques the floated out into the fading light. Coincidentally Jack Gardner also kept a diary. His was more of a record of places they saw and things they did. 

In 1874 they travel to Egypt and saw the pyramids. They also traveled to Palestine and Jerusalem and saw the Dead Sea. Mrs. Jack drank from the River Jordan and filled a bottle with river water, this she took home with her as a sacred Relic along with some desert sand from Egypt.They're also traveled to Beirut and Greece and Constantinople

.

While in Paris she shopped for the latest fashions, some were a bit risque for Boston Society, her neckline was a bit low for the uppity crowd. Page 134 John Gardner overheard a story that was going around in the Men's Clubs, 'Sargent had painted Mrs. Gardner all the way down to Crawford's notch.'' She loved the painting and said it was the best thing he ever did. She paid him $3,000 for it. She rejected his depiction of her face several times before he finally got it right. Sargent had hoped to exhibit it at the next Paris Salon but Mr. Gardner refused and decreed that the portrait should never again be publicly exhibited and it never was during his lifetime. She continued to say it was the best thing Sargent  ever did. The painting was exhibited at Boston's Saint Botolph. Today it hangs in the gothic room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

The Gardner's kept a large house in Beacon Street but also had a house in Beverly outside of Boston. There they did horseback riding and had a large garden.

She she helped raise three nephews and saw to it that they got a good education. The nephew's often lived with them. She read to them several Charles Dickens' books, including Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities.

Isabella Gardner was not the most beautiful woman in the world she perhaps was the most fashionable in Boston. She wore diamonds in her hair crafted by Tiffany. Maud Howe Elliott, writing from Rome to the Boston Transcript, said Mrs. Jack Gardner wore wonderful costumes from Paris and such furs, sables and chinchillas.

Perhaps one of the most amazing contributions to come out of her life was the idea of sponsoring artists and writers. No doubt she seemed fond of young Harvard Men, but she genuinely was curious and willing to sponsor intelligent intellectuals and artists.

By 1894 the Gardners had established a pattern of spending alternate summers in Europe. 

The Gardners often sponsored artists and writers and Young students at Harvard. Bernard Berenson was one such a fellow. On page 129 he wants to win the Parker traveling fellowship at Harvard his marks were high especially in languages and he knew that he and only one other student were being considered the other Man won. But some of Berenson's professors and a few friends raised several hundred dollars to give Berenson a traveling fellowship. The Gardners were among them. Over time Berenson would prove to be a valuable resource in helping Isabella Gardner acquire art in Europe.

One George Proctor, a budding musician, seemed to attract her attention. She sponsored him so he could study in Vienna. A total of $7,000 in 1892 so he could study under Leschetizky (page 159). He wrote letters to Mrs. Jack. These letters encouraged her. She invited him to join the Gardners in Venice in 1893.

Venice at this time would have been amazing. George met with musicians in the Palazzo Barbaro. He was treated like an honored guest. Page 180, he gushed about how great this experience was for him.

She took guests in a big gondola and hired a piano and musicians and loaded them all onto other boats and had them follow her and play music along the Grand Canal. Fireworks could be seen every night. (page 182).

After Jack died, she started working on her museum. She hired an architect who went through extraordinary efforts to keep her satisfied. He hired workers from Italy to build her museum. Disgusted with their performance, she would often show them exactly how she wanted things done. She fired them but the architect would hire them back.

Her Museum is unique because she curated the entire thing she picked all of the art for the every room and the art is incredible dating all the way back to the time of Christ. She has art stones dating to the Phoenicians, she has art from the Romans and the Greeks, and she had many pieces by prominent artists like Rembrandt and Raphael. Many of these pieces she purchased at rock bottom prices from Nobles who were broke and needed cash.

When Heather and I visited the museum, we noticed it had changed considerably. It was located near the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Supporters of the Gardner museum added an entirely new wing to the museum to support a gift shop, library, conference rooms and cafeteria. All of those support services used to be in the original museum.

Some disturbing things happened over time. In the 1970s, a director of the museum sold the large Buddha that had been part of a Chinese Asian art collection.

In the original agreement for the museum, she said that if anyone tried to sell the contents of the museum, the entire collection is to be sold and proceeds given to Harvard.

I asked two different people in the museum if an Isabella Stewart Gardner could exist today. One man said no, because she was a product of her times. Another woman, however, said yes, a woman could indeed accomplish all that Gardner had done. There are certainly wealthy women today, but how many actually speak English and French and have read Dante and spent a lifetime corresponding with artists and writers who were as significant as her friends?

I tend to believe she was anomaly, unique in her upbringing, with finishing school in Paris and an aptitude for the arts. Her own journals were full of watercolors and drawings and descriptions of the places and people she met around the world. I can only think of Peggy Guggenheim as a similar force in a later era.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is making a lasting difference. The day we were there, I saw hundreds of people. I met a young man from Italy who was studying economics at MIT, he was totally enamored with the museum.

Revenge's Greatest Thrill

Sitting here thinking
of the novel I'll write.

About a teen-ager sent away to a group home

where home boys strip off his clothes in a cattle pin

and shove him into a pile of shit. His abusers laugh. 

Seething with anger and tears, he showers for hours, but he can't get clean, his revenge is to live well, much better than those mother fuckers.

He earns his college degree and lands a job covering school boards, crime and business. The small town newspaper seems to make him a hero. Jacko the sign painter is his drinking companion at the bar.

He walks daily on the beach of Antiparos, a Greek island. The expatriate plays backgammon with John Pierre, shares a Spleef and listens to The Doors' Riders on the Storm.

The Bitcoin trader buys it cheap and watches it go up 1O0 times, now he's rich living the High Life. He drives a Ferrari on Highway 101 at Laguna Beach, California.

Looking for meaning, he devours art and creativity. He lives intensely, connecting with humanity, nature and the universe.

He works in Yellowstone National Park, where he joins a group of naturalists who bath in the hot pots. They climb Electric Peak. Reaching the top, they jump up and touch 11,000 feet above sea level. He sees far away the Teton Mountains, their shimming purple peaks in the clouds.

He reads poems with friends on the river side, with a little wine and cheese, they dance by moonlight and see the Aurora Borealis rise in the northern sky. Revenge's greatest thrill.

A better way to live, thoughtful, balanced, minimalist. Work faster, make more money, breathe in the oxygen, it's free. The golfer swings easy, the ball goes farther, go figure.

For decades he buries the secret of his past at the boys home. Then one day he looks up his abuser's name Matthew Downing. It turns out Downing raped his probation officer, spent his life in jail. And died. Who is laughing now? 

The author and his wife raise two children. They reunite with his cousins in Puerto Rico, they see Paris together, they go to Yellowstone. They celebrate their love for each other.

The cold winter leaves him depressed, feeling a loss of energy, he curls under his blanket and watches the flames of fire dance in the fireplace.

Spring clouds disappear as the sun bakes his face. He shouts "I am alive." And spreads his arms into the sky. "This is all that I am and that is enough." Revenge's greatest thrill.

--Michael Hooper, Oct. 23, 2018