Former New York Dolls frontman David Johansen (aka Buster Poindexter) real gone at 75.
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Last surviving member of the NYD (until now)
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Of the original line-up anywayā¦
From this:
to this:
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The Conversation, 1974, 1.53m 10/10
With a couple of hours to kill today l rewatched The Conversation. I first saw it about 45 years ago, but couldnāt remember much about it. It is nothing short of a masterpiece of film making and its status will only increase over the years. As a mystery/suspense/thriller it is right up there with the best of the genre, including Hitchcock, this is Coppola at the top of his game. Hackman plays a security/surveillance expert, hired to record a conversation in a park in central San Francisco. The film concentrates a lot on the technical aspects of how the recording was and is to sound, what Blow Up and Bladerunner were to photography. Hackman is a complex individual, the consummate professional in his field but who is socially awkward to the point of aloof if not totally inept. He does however have a conscience, one he developed when an earlier assignment in New York went horribly wrong. The use of sound becomes a major aspect of the film, right from the start and continues to the very last frame. If you havenāt seen this movie, you should do so, soon.
A couple of trivia points from IMDB.
Reportedly Gene Hackmanās favorite movie in which he has acted.
Francis Ford Coppola has cited Blow-Up (1966) as a key influence on his conceptualization of the filmās themes, such as surveillance versus participation, and perception versus reality. But in The Conversation (1974), the focus is on sound recording, not photography. āFrancis had seen [it] a year or two before, and had the idea to fuse the concept of Blowup with the world of audio surveillance.ā
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Angie Stone
Car crash
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Australian tennis legend and one time world number one Fred Stolle has lost his last tiebreaker and departs the great tournament of life at the age of 86.
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He was also one of the better tennis common potators after he hung up his racquet, funny as well as knowledgeable.
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Sorry to hear that one.
Growing up, Fred, along with Cliff Drysdale, were the voices of the Australian Open for American viewers on ESPN for years and years. I seem to recall them doing several Davis Cups as well.
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The voice of tennis in my youth.
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Iām so old I remember him as a player as well as a commentator. He played in the great Australian amateur era and had the bad luck to be around at the same time as Roy Emerson, and be not quite as good as Emerson. But he still won two singles grand slams and a whole lot of doubles slams.
As a commentator he excelled because he knew the game inside out and was intelligent and articulate. He was a delight to listen to because he had the self-confidence to stay silent when there was nothing worth saying, and the intelligence to be able to say sensible things when something needed to be said. I remember one game Lleyton Hewitt was playing back in his prime, which heād been winning and then began to lose. There was one set of commentators who were crapping on incessantly about how Hewitt seemed to be this, was doing that, what was happening, what would happen next, and so on and so forth. Fred said nothing for a while, then said something along these lines: āLleyton Hewitt has based his game on not making unforced errors. Heās just made five in a row.ā
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Fiery and Tony Trabert were one of the iconic tennis commentary teams in the history of the sport. They were ying and yang.
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l also remember him as a player. A good player in an era of greats.
RIP Brian James
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Just had that song on last night. RIP.
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donāt you love spell text!
Thatās not a spelling errorā¦thatās one of CJās sayings 
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Ex Mrs Hasselhoff.