Hollywood Shuts Down; Ports, Old and New; Rhodium and A Brilliant Canadian Bridge Player.
July 17 2023, Volume 4 # 9
Hollywood Shuts Down.
Actors and actresses (to give a nod to a much neglected word) are on strike, joining writers who have been out for almost three months. Boo-hoo, you say, actors are rich. Well some of them are but most of them aren’t.
Hard to get precise numbers but the majority of members don’t earn enough —$26,000 a year— to qualify for health care benefits. That’s why they are so many good looking waiters and waitresses in L.A. waiting for their big break.
Streaming services like Netflix don’t pay residuals when television series run over and over. And studios want to pay a low level actor a one time fee to use his or her face as background and then plunk it in again and again using computer tricks, aka Artificial Intelligence. Media Execs like Iger at Disney are crying poor. A tough call.
The strike is a big deal. The Entertainment biz accounts for more than six percent of the American economy; the car business a little more than three per cent. It also means you probably won’t get to see the next episode of White Lotus.
It isn’t just the United States. Production in Canada is pretty much shut down as a lot of American actors work on series shot in Vancouver and Toronto and Canadian writers and actors won’t work for American production while the strike is on. Not true everywhere. Prepare to watch a lot of British, European and Australian TV series.
No Surprises on the Automation of Work
More than 40 years ago I did a television story on Word Processing. My editors thought it was boring. Boy, were they wrong. Office work is going to be even more automated as computers get faster. Artificial Intelligence is not that scary. Legal contracts are fill in the blanks stuff, and it will be even easier to manipulate designs for buildings on the screen for architects.
I don’t see actors on this list. But their work and screen writing could be classified way down as Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports and Media. I don’t think AI could write this newsletter, but maybe I’m wrong.
On the Waterfront
Longshoremen on Canada’s West Coast are back at work. There is a backlog of containers to be sorted through. They will probably make in overtime what they lost in 13 days off the job.
It is said to have cost the economy half a billion dollars, but who knows where they get these scary numbers.
Speaking of scary, I used to cover the Port of Montreal when I was a young reporter. It is a fascinating business. I once went into the Montreal Longshoremen headquarters and asked in my heavily accented French to speak to the head of the union, Jean-Marc St. Onge. A rather large man called me a `Maudit agent’ or goddamn spy and spat on each lens of my glasses. I wasn’t about to tangle with a man who worked with a hook for a living so trying not to shake too much, I cleaned my glasses and repeated my question and then spoke to the boss.
There was another longshoremen’s union in Montreal, the Checkers, who did clerical work. They were all Irish and English-speakers; Jean-Marc’s group were almost all French speakers. This linguistic division of labour was not uncommon. The union that fixed elevators and escalators were also English-speakers. While having a drink with the president of Maritime Employers Association, Arnie Masters, I asked him why the Checkers were Irish, like him. “That’s because you can steal more with a pen than you can with a hook.” There were a few F adjectives in there I left out.
Masters and his lawyer, Brian Mulroney— the future prime minister— were key players in cleaning up the Port of Montreal. At a public inquiry into the thievery on the port Mulroney stood in front of Jean-Marc St. Onge and said: “This man is a cancer on the port of Montreal.” Apparently Madame St. Onge was upset when she saw that on TV. It was very gutsy of Mulroney and I always admired him from then on.
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Rhodium: The Most Precious Metal
The price of Rhodium on Friday was $4,450 an ounce or 2.3 times the price of gold at $1,959 an ounce. Rhodium is extremely rare and found mostly when looking for platinum and nickel. Like platinum it is used in catalytic converters and jewellery.
Sixty percent of Rhodium is produced in South Africa, followed by 10% in Russia, 5% in Zimbabwe and 2% in Canada, almost all of it from mines in and around Sudbury.
Over the Top EV
The Rolls Royce Spectre. All Electric. $420,000 or C$550,000 base price . Enough for a small condo. Range: 260 miles or 420 kilometres. The review in Business Insider says it is super quiet. There is an umbrella hidden in the door.
The ad the 1950s boasted all you could hear was the clock. Nothing digital here now.
The World Eats A lot of Chicken and Fish
You Can’t Make This Stuff Up
Congressman Tim Burchett is a Republican from Tennessee. In case you think this is some left wing paper picking on him, the Spectator World is firmly to the right.
Essay of the Week
I am a good mediocre level bridge player. An addict, I play online almost very day. Which is why my editor at the Globe and Mail asked me to write a bridge obit.
Eric Kokish was a world-class bridge player who took home medals at four World Championships, won two North American titles, and went on to become a top coach in the world of elite competitive bridge. Mr. Kokish, who died on June 10 at age 76, was also a prolific writer of books and articles about the cerebral game.
“He was the Leonardo da Vinci of bridge. He was a master of every part of the game, from playing to writing,” his friend and fellow bridge enthusiast John Carruthers said. “In my opinion he was the best bridge coach in the world.”
Eric Kokish was born in Montreal on May 19, 1947, and spent his early years in the St. Urbain Street area made famous in Mordecai Richler’s novels. His father, Hugo Kokish, was a Holocaust survivor, born in Vienna. He escaped to Britain just before the war and was held in a camp on the Isle of Man before being sent to Canada. He had been a baker in the internment camp and for a time operated a bakery in the inner suburb of Montreal West. Mr. Kokish’s mother, Lucy (née Feinstein), had escaped from Eastern Europe with her family just before the war and they settled in Montreal, where she met her future husband.
The Kokish family moved to Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district. Eric taught himself how to play bridge reading a book on a train trip from New York to Montreal, he later said. He went to Monkland High School.
“We started playing bridge in high school,” his wife, Beverly Kraft, said. “We were in the same class for four years.” Eric became president of their high school bridge club.
The pair went on to McGill University and they both played bridge at the McGill Bridge Club, on Sherbrooke Street. Mr. Kokish planned to be an architect, he said, but he switched from science to arts when bridge got in the way. In his first year at McGill he met Joey Silver.
“I was his first serious partner back in the late 1960s,” said Mr. Silver, who was a few years older. “You could see that Eric had talent. He was very bright and personable. We were quite successful; we played and won international tournaments. We actually won the North American tournament together in 1974, the Vanderbilt.”
Winning a tournament at that level marked Mr. Kokish as a serious international bridge star.
“We were the youngest team ever to win the event,” Mr. Kokish said in an interview with the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) in 2012. “And we did it in Vancouver, in Canada, so it was sort of a special moment.” He said many years later that one crucial hand in that game was his favourite in all his years of playing and coaching bridge.
Mr. Kokish had studied law at McGill, but didn’t take the bar exams. Even in law school he was playing bridge for money. For a while he ran a bridge club, which is a small business, and worked for several years as a research analyst for a British mining company at its office in Montreal.
“I knew nothing about mining. I got the job only because the guy who hired me was interested in learning how to play bridge,” Mr. Kokish said in the ACBL interview. “My boss and I had a wager whether he would learn how to play bridge before I mastered the mining business and I think he lost.”
Mr. Kokish went on to partner with Peter Nagy, in what he described as his best run ever, from the late 1970s to the early 80s. They won silver at the 1978 World Open Pairs and bronze at the Rosenblum Cup in 1982 and 1990.
One of his first coaching jobs was with the Brazilian international team in the mid-1980s. Mr. Kokish and his partner had come second to the Brazilians in an international championship, and they were impressed by his play. He worked training the team in Brazil. It was not easy. He recalled that the Brazilian players, though successful, would often yell at their partners if they thought they had made a mistake in bidding or play.
In the simplest terms, bridge is a card game where two partners play against another pair. In tournament play the team that runs up the highest score wins. Each player starts with 13 cards and there are 635 billion possible hands. The hands are almost always different but players learn to see patterns. Partners bid for how many tricks they will take, using a strict bidding code. It helps to be good at mental math.
Though he excelled as a player, Mr. Kokish spent most of the past two decades as a coach for the best bridge teams in the world.
In 1995, Mr. Kokish, Joey Silver and the rest of the Canadian team came second in the Bermuda Bowl, the most prestigious tournament in the world of bridge, losing to the Nickell Team, led by Frank (Nick) Nickell, who runs a Wall Street private equity firm when he isn’t playing bridge.
Soon afterward Mr. Nickell hired Mr. Kokish as his team’s coach. Mr. Nickell paid his players and his coach well and Mr. Kokish travelled with the team wherever they played.
“Eric’s patience and coaching helped make our system better,” said Mr. Nickell in a telephone interview from Maine. “Eric was very good at asking ‘How would you deal with that’. He was the team’s best cheerleader and coach for 25 years.”
Mr. Kokish also coached other international teams, including those in Holland and Indonesia. The Indonesian experience did not end well. Soon after the Kokish family moved to Indonesia in 1998, riots broke out, a thousand people were killed in civic unrest.
“We took our son with us when we moved to Indonesia for a while to train their teams and he was just turning 10,” Ms. Kraft recalled. “They had set us up in this big house where we trained the bridge players every day and I was there maybe eight weeks and Eric and Matthew were there another two months or so. I was never happier than to see two people arrive back here. It was really scary.”
Mr. Kokish returned to the competitive bridge table in 2017, playing with Fred Gitelman, a bridge legend and entrepreneur who started Bridge Base Online, the International standard for online bridge play.
“After not having played seriously for about 17 years, he and Fred played the Yei Brothers Cup in China,” Mr. Silver said. “Every year it’s a $50,000 tournament, huge prizes and it attracts all the best players in the world. All the first-class teams. They won it. That’s how great a player Eric was. He was a player who just didn’t make mistakes. When a great play was called for he would make it.”
As well as coaching and playing, Mr. Kokish wrote books on bridge, newspaper columns and advice in a bridge magazine for elite players. He also invented the Kokish Relay Convention which helps on bidding extremely powerful bridge hands.
Mr. Kokish’s other interests included baseball memorabilia and his giant collection of vinyl records and CDs, his wife said.
“He liked the old fifties and sixties stuff originally and moved on to Motown and to Leonard Cohen, Dylan and Joni. It seemed that these bridge players all liked the same kind of music,” Ms. Kraft said.
Mr. Kokish was a friendly, open man who always seemed to have a smile on his face. Along with being paid well to coach the best teams in the world, he enjoyed coaching junior teams pro bono. He had this advice for one member of a junior team: “Find yourself a partner you enjoy being with and work on the game together. And try and find the best level of competition you can find. Get your brains beaten out for a while. That’s the way to get better.”
Mr. Kokish leaves his wife, Ms. Kraft; four children, Matthew Kraft-Kokish, Elyse Chazan, Lori Hurwitz and Mayera Chazan (none of whom play bridge); and seven grandchildren.