Pixiv bookmark tagger12/14/2023 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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