Encounters · No. 15 – This was written before Kusama’s passing, and originally scheduled for a November release. Due to current events, we have moved things around. You can read her obituary here. Infinity, One Dot at a Time Yayoi Kusama has been covering every surface she can reach with dots and nets and flowersContinue reading “Yayoi Kusama”
Category Archives: Essay
The Reel Argument: Whit Stillman
By Bergotte Whit Stillman has made only five feature films in thirty-five years, yet they constitute one of the most coherent bodies of work in contemporary American cinema. They take place in worlds that either barely exist or have already disappeared: Manhattan débutante society, Americans abroad in the final years of the Cold War,Continue reading “The Reel Argument: Whit Stillman”
The Reel Argument: Andrei Tarkovsky
By Bergotte Andrei Tarkovsky is the filmmaker most often recommended and least often watched, and the reason for this is a lie — a well-intentioned, widely repeated lie that has done more damage to his reputation than any honest criticism could. The lie is that his films are difficult. They are not difficult. They areContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Andrei Tarkovsky”
We Will Always Love You, Dolly
By Bergotte Dolly Rebecca Parton, January 19, 1946 — August 25, 2026 Dolly Parton died yesterday in Nashville, Tennessee, after a brief battle with cancer. She was eighty years old. Sixteen months earlier, she had lost Carl Dean, her husband of nearly six decades, and she had said openly that she had not taken careContinue reading “We Will Always Love You, Dolly”
The Human Condition According to Gogol
By Bergotte There is a moment in Nikolai Gogol’s story The Nose when a government official named Kovalyov discovers that his nose has left his face, dressed itself in a uniform of higher rank than his own, and is travelling around St Petersburg attending church services and paying social calls. Kovalyov’s attempts to recover hisContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Gogol”
The Ennis House
The House That Time Built Wrong Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Ennis House in 1923 using a system of patterned concrete blocks that he believed could democratise beautiful architecture. The building that resulted was neither democratic nor entirely stable, but it was something rarer: a structure so formally complete, so strange in its relationship toContinue reading “The Ennis House”
John Derian
Makers & Rooms — Essay II The Man Who Saved the Image John Derian didn’t invent decoupage. He did something harder: he convinced the world that beauty could come from what had already been beautiful once, that the archive was inexhaustible, and that a shop on a quiet street in downtown Manhattan could function asContinue reading “John Derian”
Fernando Caruncho
The Gardener Who Thought in Light Fernando Caruncho, who died on 23 August 2026 at the age of sixty-eight, called himself a gardener rather than a designer. The distinction was not false modesty. It was a philosophical position — one he had held since he first understood that the garden was not a space toContinue reading “Fernando Caruncho”
What’s So Special About Joni Mitchell
By Bergotte Joni Mitchell did not simply write songs about her life. She invented a language for the interior life of a woman at the precise moment in history when no such language was thought to be necessary — and then she kept reinventing it, album by album, tuning by tuning, until she had producedContinue reading “What’s So Special About Joni Mitchell”
One Is Not Born: Who We Are According to Simone de Beauvoir
She wrote the book that changed what women thought they were allowed to want. She lived a life that her own philosophy would judge with considerable severity. She was the most important philosopher of freedom of the twentieth century, and she spent decades in the gravitational field of a man who made her smaller. TheContinue reading “One Is Not Born: Who We Are According to Simone de Beauvoir”
My World of Interiors 