She begged me to walk down to a café in the Village for a late night espresso night cap.  I was reluctant knowing that coffee was the last thing I wanted or needed at that hour.  “Oh come on”, she continued to implore, “It’s on your way home… sort of.  Besides it’s just too beautiful a night to go home so soon”.  Well… how do you say no to someone like New York City?  Tired as I was I agreed. We walked down through Washington Square Park through the late night narco-dealing flotsam and landed at Dante’s on McDougal Street where they were just closing for the night.  But when they saw New York City they invited us in and made us feel completely at home.  This seemed to be a continuous theme for her - an open invitation and free-pass access to anywhere at anytime. I settled for a decaf espresso but New York City, true to her nature, had a double cappuccino fully primed with caffeine.  She was beginning to gather steam again and her manic qualities were re-firing.  I could see she had no intention of calling it a night but I was, by now, totally spent. I mean, I’m only human but New York City is… well, a phantasm of pure frenzied inexhaustible energy.

But finally it had to be final and she walked me back to my place where we kissed a lingering and tender good night at my door.  I was completely in love with her after this magical evening and despite my complete exhaustion I surprised myself by asking her up to my place for a second nightcap.  She refused and would not do so on subsequent dates no matter how often I asked.  It never happened and never does; for anyone.  Its not that New York City isn’t that ‘kind of girl’, she is.  She is totally and completely, the penultimate definition of it in fact.  No, the reason she will never come to your place is because it is just that, your place.  And just as she is not interested in your personal history she is equally uninterested in any part of you as an individual.  If you want wild hedonism, an orgy filled night of unbridled naked, drunken and drugged out S-I-N she will enthusiastically accommodate you  to the point of death even.  But you must always go to her place which is every place but yours.

It took quite awhile for us to say goodnight because although she wouldn’t come up with me she insisted I stay out with her.  She so hates to see the night end and desperately tries to keep the party, always hers, going.  She pretended to pout and accused me of acting like

“such a stick in mud”.  Being as much intoxicated with  love as alcohol I have to admit I was mildly tempted to keep going.  But we said a last, last, good night and then with a light laugh she strode off into the thin remnants of the night.  I wearily took the elevator to my loft, noted the un-godly hour with a sigh and opened my blinds.  I looked out over Mercer Street, then took in SoHo and finally glanced at the few twinkling lights of the buildings bordering the Hudson River.  And there she was, everywhere, always beckoning, always waiting and never -   as the song says - sleeping.

Missy Lipsett, Mike Weiss Gallery

The initial take on Missy Lipsett’s art is its contradictory physicality.  She raises a question that others have raised which is: where is the dividing line between painting and sculpture?  Each of these pieces comprises paint applied to canvas and hung on the wall. That makes them paintings, right?  Yes, but then there are those thick folds and the play of actual light and shadow across them not to mention the irregular edges which challenge the traditional confines of paintings on stretched canvas.  So are they sculpture?  Yes, sculpture and painting in which the content for the work is found in the constant struggle between the two. But Lipsett keeps both sides in check so that the interacting tension strengthens the work without diminishing either aspect. In other words each of