Beauty and Style

My teeth are better, hurray! No root canal needed - I don't know what fixed them but I'm not complaining.

I've been spending some time in Japanese poetry lately, and on the rugged west coast of North Island, and the beauty I find in places like this resonates deeply with me. Like catching a glimpse of another dimension, deeper level of reality, transcendence...whatever.

I recently watched the film 'Azumi', which is a bloody but beautiful portrayal of the lives of some assasins in the feudal age of Japan. The cinematography is imaginative, and - though a bit cliched - the characters and landscape present a kind of tragic beauty that moves you (well, me) deep within.
In what I see of the modern world, the beautiful is something almost fundamentally different to this, a sanitised abstract that has somehow manifested itself in our dimension. I live in a city of style (Wellington), where what is appreciated is the ultra-cool, the sleek, the minimalist (of course I'm wildly generalising here). Cafes, paintings, cinema, photos. I-pods and internet designs. Logos and fashion.

Are we replacing beauty with style?

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