decidedlyodd

Last night, Ken and I went to see a 9:45pm showing at the King Cat Theater of Fashion Victims (original title: Reine Geschmacksache, literal translation: Pure Matter of Taste) at SLGFF. I liked the film a lot. The story was compelling, although a bit over the top at one point. The pacing was good. The film was generally well made. I always like to see German films too just to try to keep up my language skills.

While it had a gay story line, it didn’t hit the viewer over the head with it, it was more incidental or secondary and didn’t rely on tired stereotyping or the gay equivalent of minstrel show tactics. It’s something I like a lot about European gay cinema compared to a lot of American gay cinema.

Afterward, Ken and I grabbed a late dinner at the Hurricane Cafe which was just around the corner from the theater. Both the restaurant and the theater are located in the Denny Triangle neighborhood, which to me is this strange unexplored void between downtown, Belltown, Capitol Hill (where I live) and South Lake Union (where I work). Ken and I were talking about the Shazam iPhone app and used it several times to figure what song was playing on the jukebox. For those who don’t know how this works, you let the app record about 10 seconds of audio via the microphone, then it tells you what the song and artist are. It seems to work even in noisy rooms. I’m totally fascinated by this because I’m honestly curious how this computationally works. Being able to match 10 seconds of possibly poorly recorded audio against a massive database of songs is completely intractable with a naive, brute force approach. Something quite cool must be going on computationally on the back end to make all of this work.