Near the end of a live two-song CD by the Magik Markers called a “A Panygeric to the Things I Do Not Understand,” Elisa Ambrogio, the band’s intensely compelling front woman, sings: “It’s a wrong New York/It’s a city you forgot.” Her delivery sounds almost like a rap and like so much of what springs from her mouth, entirely improvised.

The Magik Markers were formed in Hartford, Conn. in 2001 by Ambrogio, drummer Pete Nolan and Leah Quimby, the former bassist who left the band last year. It is a safe bet that people don’t think of the Magik Markers in terms of recorded output. For one, the band’s legacy is so intertwined with its notorious live shows as to be defined by them. But also, it is difficult to know just how many releases the band has put out. Its recorded history is a trail of rare and out-of-print CD-Rs, vinyl and cassette tapes that were either sold at shows or sold through small labels in limited quantities. Up until last year the band had never recorded in a studio. In other words, it still requires effort to be a fan of the Magik Markers, rare in a world that has been so compressed by media.

We here at Last Exit are obsessed with the discussion of place. Specifically, we are interested in how cities, towns and countries change people or how people change them. New York City is always central to this thought, not only because we live here, but because of how overwhelmingly different it is today from the vibrant creative center it once was. Though this city is still home to a significant number of important artists, writers and musicians, New York no longer really embraces them. Gentrification is central to this change, a movement the city eagerly encouraged through rezoning that amounts to little more than rolling out a red carpet before builders of high-rise luxury condos.

So of course we were moved by Ambrogio’s line about a New York that is forgotten and all wrong. We met up with her after a show and proposed an interview. She agreed, but asked that we email the questions to her. Somewhat reluctant since email interviews are almost always drab, formal affairs, we nevertheless sent five questions. She responded to three, but her argument against New York City was so lucid and poetic we decided to make it the entire interview. We gathered that Ambrogio was on her way out, moving from New York to somewhere else, and this was a blistering kiss-off to a city that had let her down.

PM: On the album “A Panygeric to the Things I Do Not Understand” you sing, “It’s a wrong New York/It’s a city you forgot.” What does that mean to you?

Elisa: New York was the place I built my entire psyche around from as soon as I knew it existed, I didn’t know what was going on there; my idea of New York was some kind of vaudeville/Bob Hope idea from Warner Brothers’ cartoons and old movies, I would draw elaborate one dimensional cities from one edge of the notebook paper to the other, no space between the buildings, trees all topiary balls of green like they are in cartoons. I would practice jokes and tap dancing so I could make it on Broadway. We couldn’t afford dance lessons or anything: I would just ‘practice’. I would tell jokes I saw in cartoons, jokes that were old in 1945. I was just sunk at nine in the world of the vaudeville man. I don’t know why. Then there was the Glass family, the Caulfield family, the Salinger New York. That came next. Now in no particular order: When I was a little girl my mom would watch old Saturday Night Live and in the 1970’s those were very New York centric; this became another part of this place. Then a biography of the Roosevelt family. Then as I got older it became the legend of Cro-Mags, The Abused, Judge, Agnostic Front, Supertouch, Cause for Alarm and Reagan Youth songs. It became the filthy-gutter-needles-fight-chains of Tompkins Square Park in the early 80’s. Avenues A, B, C and D—Alphabet city all fucked up—A-you’re asking for it, B-you best watch your back, C-you’re crazy and D-you’re dead. Yeah, yeah. The fear, the chain belts, the wanting sear guitar, heavy and cutting and desperate and blazing through shitty tape and one dimensional production, the strange search for meaning and violence and peace all at once, yeah, yeah. I was sunk at 13 in the world of Roger Miret. I don’t know why.

The next year I discovered Ginsberg and Burroughs and Corso and then I had Harlem and rooftops and Columbia. Hachachacha! The teasticks, man! Bennies! And the jugs of wine and the avant-garde piano noodling and the fingersnaps! Yeah, yeah! The bohemians eating Chinese food! Chow mein! Streetcars! F. Scott’s New York, the Princeton weekend crowd, the Biltmore, the 136 revolutions he and Zelda spun in the revolving door, the hermetically sealed apartments of the wealthy, Wharton’s New York, E.B. White’s New York, the hotels and martinis and the New Yorker. And then I read the Tooth of Crime, the Sam Shepard play and after I started reading about him all of a sudden I had started into another kind of New York to get me all fidgety and chomping, a New York of an apartment with Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Sam Shepard, the punks were smart! Richard Lloyd and a new kind of guitar and new ideas. Dionysius in 69 to Richard Schechner to Marian Zazella to LaMonte Young and all new ideas.

Then Lou Reed and Lou Reed’s New York, and drugs that were cooler than my parents’ hippie drugs, yeah, like real amphetamine New York, rich girls getting shot in the ass by Upper West Side corrupt Dr. Haha’s and cigs and sunglasses and running, pretentious fuckwads frooging in front of projections of kalidescoping ink blobs, and furry repeat guitars dah dah dah, the 48 hour wake up to give my insomnia a little sheen of cool.

Then Morton Feldman’s New York and suddenly Charlamanage Palestine and a break like no other break and then the Brill Building and Carole King’s New York, Neil Sedaka, banging it out on the piano, I think we gotta hit! Then Didion’s New York, like Plath’s New York, fashion magazine offices and sweatersets and cabs, then Pat Place, then China Burg, women like no other women, weirdos like no other weirdos, guitars like no other guitars. All of it pulsing with a preposterous vitality, vainglory and vertigo, a city, the city, the thrum running through Dave Insurgent the same thrum running through Diane Arbus. All of these archetypes and ideals dogged me. And it was so close! All of this was happening two HOURS from my shitty woods in Connecticut where everybody looked stupid and lived boring. And just think if when I was 10 I had known, I could have taken a bus and seen a good CBGB’s hardcore matinee. In some cases like the Ponytails said, I was born too late, but man, I was pretty sure it was all still happening and all I had to do was get there.

New York though is the wrong city. I got it wrong. The city I built is the city of specific people and ideas and places that do not exist in the same way. This town is turning into Boston. Cheese. College kids. I got here just in time for blow up towers, corporate Times Square, slash and burn architectural policies and Williamsburg. New York is doing the deep Trader Joe’s safety dance and vitality, yeah here and there evident in bright brilliant flashes of light, is all so much offal at this point. Whatever, man. It works some miracles, but not enough.

The Magik Markers first studio album, BOSS, is out now on Ecstatic Peace.