He befriended Ramos while taking his ministry to the streets of Boyle Heights in 1993. Manuel Carrizalez, founder of the Bakersfield-based Stay Focused Ministries, says he’s seen the rise and fall and rise again of Chaka. Married six years but separated from his wife, he has an apartment behind a small grocery in a rough part of town. Ramos lives in Bakersfield now, scraping out a living by painting advertising murals and signs for small businesses. The ultimate bite - after he’d lost smaller chunks of his freedom for petty crimes such as swiping three pairs of Nikes from a Mervyn’s department store in 1998 - was the 20 months he served for robbing a convenience store, using a bottle to threaten the clerk. It comes back to bite you, and steals away from doing anything positive.” You try to do all these positive things, and then behind the curtains, do some dirt. I still wanted to hang out in the projects, doing negative stuff. Whatever little reason they could find, they would jail me.” But then he looks inward. But by the mid-1990s, he was back where he’d grown up, in the Aliso Village project in Boyle Heights, and partying hard.Īt first, Ramos blames outside forces for his missed chances: “The law was on me real tough. Soon, articles were being written about Chaka’s reformation, how he was using his talent to decorate church buses and create murals aimed at inspiring disadvantaged kids. He reached out to street ministers for help and was steered to a religiously grounded residential treatment program in Lancaster. Having graduated to harder drugs, including PCP, Ramos seemingly hit bottom in 1993. Ramos says that absence remains “an unhealed wound.” He also got a 14-year-old girlfriend pregnant and hasn’t seen his son since infancy. Instead, he returned to jail in 1992 on a marijuana possession charge. Cal State Northridge was eager to have him enroll as an art major. The sadder truth resides in numerous old news stories: After his initial 1991 sentencing to three years’ probation and 1,560 hours of graffiti cleanup duty, opportunities were dangled, including designing T-shirts, inclusion in a gallery exhibition of graffiti art, maybe even a feature film or television documentary about his life. Had Chaka played his cards differently, he could have built something from his notoriety. graffiti,” she wrote, and his key contribution was the simplicity and legibility of his writing at a time when taggers’ script was too tangled or ornate to be understood by the uninitiated. Chaka, like the city, was anything you wanted to make him, Los Angeles at its best or its worst or at least its most quirky.”Ĭhaka became “the common reference point for all L.A. ![]() But, she wrote, “for others, he represented the worst of our city, out-of-control youth with screwed up values. ![]() In her 1999 book, “Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A.,” anthropologist Susan A. Just a feeling of being able to get the public looking, to leave them in wonderment.” Just me, a spray can and a wall on the streets of L.A. “I wanted everybody on the edge of their seat, wondering, ‘Who is this guy?’ It leaves an anticipation in the air of what’s going to get hit next. He says he was writing a mystery, an aerosol whodunit, and taking silent pride in keeping the public guessing who that omnipresence on walls, trains, signs, water towers and freeway overpasses could be. But as he considers his two-year tagging spree more deeply, Ramos, 36, begins to talk about a motive beyond fame-seeking that led him to splash the cityscape with those five blatant, blocky, baldly legible letters. He is going over his past in a soft voice, his small but solid frame seated on a plastic milk crate in the dusty back courtyard of Mid-City Arts, Los Angeles street-art supply shop and gallery that this weekend mounts “Resurrection,” the first art show of his life.
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![]() Here are some common angel numbers I see along with their general messages from the universe and what to do when you notice them. Or going to start your first day of a gym membership and being assigned locker number 222. These numbers can be decoded to reveal a message. In the case of angel numbers, sometimes what you’re doing or thinking the moment you see the number is most significant, like thinking you should expand your business and then looking up right as the clock in your office turns 1:11. Repeating number sequences like 111 are synchronicities we call angel numbers. You can search your name or any other phrase and the online gematria calculator will calculate the. If you think something you overhear in line at a store, a book or movie recommendation from a friend, an animal who crosses your path, a helpful person showing up in your life, or a song that comes on the radio might be synchronistic divine guidance, pay attention to how you feel when it happens.ĭoes time seem to slow down, as if the moment is pregnant with meaning? Do you experience physical cues from your intuition like getting chills? Does this potential sign keep popping into your mind hours or days later? Does this potential sign speak to a larger theme in your life? Even if it’s not what you wanted to hear, deep down inside does this information still register as a sign? Any of these could indicate a synchronicity. The English Gematria Calculator is an online calculator for finding the value of a word or a phrase in gimatria, but not only, it also searches the database for more phrases and words that equals in the gematria value to the searched element. This is a high energy and passion number with equal doses of self-alignment, spiritual purpose or destiny, and soul plan action. Three 1s symbolize triple the power of number 1, the number of beginnings, karma, new cycles, and initiatory forces. The 111 angel number is a powerful symbol of strength, urging you to tap into your inner resilience and embrace your full potential. Keep in mind angel numbers are just one type of sign, and you can receive a sign or synchronicity in countless ways. Angel number 111 is a powerful number of fresh starts, self-leadership, and new beginnings. They could also appear as "split" numbers, like 3303.Īngel numbers are a synchronicity, or a meaningful coincidence-divine guidance from angels and the universe. They might pop up on a license plate, in a phone number, on a bill, or on a billboard. ![]() Angel numbers are number sequences that usually appear in groups of three or four numbers, like 1111, 333, and 777. Angel number 111 also symbolizes positive thoughts and motivation, as well as creative ideas. Photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Imag ![]() Generators power a few buildings in downtown San Juan as Puerto Rico is completely without electricity following Hurricane Maria on Sept. But a campaign called Queremos Sol, or We Want Sun, has faced major barriers in pressuring the commonwealth’s power company to prioritize community solar in its reconstruction plans. The system already proved itself effective when earthquakes on the island knocked out power again in 2020. The idea is that when the grid goes down - which it did for months after Hurricane Maria in 2017 - the people who need electricity most, or who can act as a resource hub, will stay powered. On the island, organizers in the mountaintop community of Adjuntas, led by the environmental justice organization Casa Pueblo, have succeeded in distributing solar panels with storage capacity to dozens of community members with medical needs or who have the capacity to provide resources like refrigeration for neighbors. ![]() Puerto Rico perhaps represents the most powerful testing ground for distributed solar energy in a crisis. Rooftop solar, Mitchell added, also “aids in grid flexibility and resiliency and mitigating peak demand.” “We choose rooftop solar and community solar as an intervention in part to build wealth within communities and have it be something that supports local jobs and results in bill savings and keeps those resources as local as possible,” said Hanna Mitchell, Texas program director of Solar United Neighbors, which is leading the 30 Million Solar Homes plan alongside the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and the Initiative for Energy Justice. ![]() Yet so far, President Joe Biden hasn’t made distributed renewables or rooftop solar a central element of his climate plans, and local efforts have faced major hurdles to scaling up.Īs the Biden administration prepares to unveil a sprawling economic recovery and infrastructure bill, a coalition of energy justice advocates are calling for new federal policies that would add up to 30 million homes powered by rooftop and community solar energy. While right-wing Texas politicians have sought to blame the yet-to-be-enacted Green New Deal - a jobs, energy savings, and clean power initiative - for the outages, aspects of the most progressive versions of the program, like community and rooftop solar energy, are being pushed by leaders from marginalized communities exactly because they will offer better disaster resiliency. In the wake of blackouts driven by extreme weather in Puerto Rico, California, and now Texas, grassroots organizers have repeatedly highlighted the potential for disaster resiliency through community-controlled renewable energy. |
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