Only in LA
The Story of Rami Cremesti aka Kremesti in Los Angeles, California
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This is a photographic tribute to one of the most beautiful, cool and crazy cities in the world: Los Angeles, California.
I lived there between 1999 and 2004 where I spent some of the best years of my life ... The beautiful, diverse people... The Hollywood stars... the beaches... the mountains... nature... the good ethnic food... the porn stars... the weather... the palm trees... the live music... the night clubs... the cafes... the universities... the museums... the style... the fashion shows... the Latinas... The Arab women... The Persian women... the Asian women... the surfing... I could go on and on...
When I lived in Irvine, Orange County which is the city I moved to in December 1998 after I finished my graduate studies in UNT, I used to hang out with a bunch of Lebanese friends (Ali Hamade and Ibrahim al Sayyed Abu) and some Korean girls. One of the odd jobs I held there was parking cars at the Irvine Spectrum. I used to go boogie boarding in the famous Wedge in Newport beach. Soon after I discovered Laguna Beach which is such a beautiful beach town it's almost unreal. There are many art galleries there and an annual Art Festival. Soon I met Amalid one of the strongest loves of my life and that is how this website was created, a tribute to her. It was love at first sight. While living in Irvine, I worked for SBN.COM for a while until i set up cremesti.com, got fired then went to work for shopping.com in Newport Beach. There my boss was a lawyer named Mark Doumani who drove an amazing black Nissan NSX. While in Irvine, I designed the Wedge - Conquer Your Demons logo and I sold some T-shirts with that logo around Newport beach. I had also developed my Krasiva.com website back then and I was in awe of the beauty of women especially Middle Eastern women... I used to drive around in my 1986 Camaro with my surf board next to me...
In 2000 I got a job with Spherion a Fortune 500 company as an IT consultant I got my papers straight and i was flying over the moon from joy. I moved to Los Angeles for work and I got a two bedroom flat in Sherman Oaks on Sepulveda Blvd off of Ventura Blvd. What beautiful memories... A year later in 2001, the .com sector collapsed and then 9/11 happened and I was laid off and real scared...i moved back to Lebanon for about year, hated it and came back to the USA on a tourist visa.
I tutored many kids in chemistry after I got laid off and one of them was a gorgeous singer/actress named Lauren Mayhiew. One of my friends from LA was Luigi a total hippy that smoked a lot of weed back then. Me and him went to a Marcel Khalife concert in San Francisco, smoked weed with some girls afterwards, Luigi got trippy and started climbing trees in San Francisco.... We visited Mavericks and Half Moon Bay on the way back to LA that place is soooo surreal... It's mystical... We once climbed the hill across from the Getty Museum with our mountain bikes and had the wildest ride down... When we reached the bottom we were all wide smiles.... Around this time I worked for a while as a portrait photographer at a place called Portrait Perfect. I thought that I had found my life's calling. Photography and the Sacred Awe transported me to another world.... a world of sheer beauty and ecstasy.... I still used an old Russian Zenit camera back then with a tele-zoom lens. I am publishing my photography very soon in a book titled For Love of the Sacred Awe, look for it.
Once I was off during the week, and went down to Topanga Beach. There was a cute girl there in bikinis and we hung out. We hit it off, and I remember looking at the ocean from the point of view of lying down, and looking over her butt... it was the most beautiful point of view of the Ocean ever. I told her let me dust off the sand off your butt I feel like I am unearthing a beautiful statue of a Greek Goddess and she let me... she gave me a massage and I came in my shorts... that was sooo embarrassing. Once I was taking a photo of a woman's breast in LA against the setting sun, and I also had an orgasm... I will never forget those most beautiful, Platonic embarrassing orgasms.... I have another crazy story from LA: I once met a transvestite, we went on a date we watched the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Afterwards we were making out in my Camaro and she told me that she used to be a man. I was shocked... My being and my understanding of what a man and what a woman is was shaken to the core...
Once, me and Luigi, camped in Topanga Canyon State Park and at night the wolves or coyotes were howling it was sooo trippy in a cool way. These days I worked in Labor Ready as a day laborer and did some freelance web design too when i had no students to tutor. I shared a one bedroom flat for a short time near Santa Monica college with a Paki student and a Polish kid. Soon afterwards, I had left the flat and was living for a little while with my buddy Eddie Avila the photographer in Santa Monica and then I was living in the Venice Beach Hostel with a bunch of weirdos but it was such a free lifestyle. I met some beautiful girls at this hostel. One of them was Italian I took her photo. She told me in Italy they call a vagina the bearded mussel how funny is that?
I had crashed my Camaro in Beverly hills earlier that year and I was riding a bicycle by now. I used to visit Markos my friend from UNT in Thousand Palms he worked for Lockheed Martin back then, he's a very smart PhD in theoretical physics has the heart of a poet... For a while I was volunteering in UCLA in a Pharmacology lab where I met the daughter of Nobel Prize Laureate Ahmad Zewail. I was also helping Professor Ohyun Kwon with her chemistry papers and grant applications, her English was bad back then, she is a very smart cookie.... I also hung out with the AUB Alumni crowd headed by Dr. Lina Kurdahi. I will not forget my Lebanese architect friend Nadim Itani either with whose group of architects we went to many hikes to places like Santa Barbara. Ln LA, Amalid broke my heart, it was un-requited love. I had another girlfriend later, a Syrian beauty named Rania whom I met in church in St. Nicolas downtown LA. In LA, I also worked for a while at Brentwood School as a substitute chemistry teacher. I lasted there 2 months coz the kids had got a-hold of my Erotica LA website, the director got to know about it, and I was given the option to take it down or leave so I left... heheheh Freedom of Expression I thought.... I made the CaO (Calcium Oxide) plus water experiment for them which is the chemical way to produce heat for hot packs... I put my finger in the slurry, it was moist and hot, just like the scene with the apple pie from the movie American Beauty I told them.... In L.A I discovered the poetry of Charles Bukowski and Rumi. Charles Bukowski is in a class of his own... and Rumi poetry is truly transformative... I published my first book The Other Cheek of Islam years later in the UK. I also have fond memories of Point Dume where I used to go spear fishing. One of the photos in the compilation on this page is from there of me with a horn shark.
2004 I left LA with a broken heart. I had no luck finding a decent job for 3 fucking hears. I drove with an Israeli dude from the Hostel in Venice Beach all through a blizzard in Texas, all the way to NY to see my sister. From there I flew back to Lebanon. In the hostel in NY, I met a Pakistani girl from the UK and we made out it was sooo beautiful. We talked about Qawwali Sufi music.
I hope I can visit California again some day and take more photos. A piece of my heart is still there... May be I can take my beautiful girls there.
Sincerely
Rami Elias Kremesti M.Sc., CSci, CEnv, CWEM
Last updated:
5th October, 2021
High Wycombe, UK