Joshua Smelser

The basics: Aquarius. Born at the beginning the 80’s in South Florida and lived there until 1993. I spent my teens and early 20's near Atlanta, GA; volunteered at a no-kill no-cage cat shelter and a zoo then got employed at a pet store, a veterinarian, a video store, a music store and a big blue computer company (while also spending a few semesters in college) . At age 27 I decided to pack up and switch coasts, I drove across the country alone for 3 days until I reached the county of Los Angeles in my new home state of California. For the last 7 years I’ve worked for a large healthcare organization performing various jobs that require little to no medical knowledge. I live by myself with my one-eyed Siamese cat in the South Bay/Beach Cities area. I have one sibling, a 17-month younger sister who lives in Georgia near my parents (who are still married). I’ve been an ovo-lacto vegetarian since 1996. For the last 15 or so years I’ve immersed myself in my main three interests: music, movies and otters. I own an estimated 3,000+ CDs and have attended around 700 concerts. There are 5 instruments in my house (keyboard, guitar, violin, theremin and a musical saw) but I don’t currently possess the ability to play a single song on any of them. I spent a handful of years maintaining social media networks for four or five different musicians/bands. Since 2006 I’ve uploaded close to 900 videos of live music performances to YouTube and I recently launched a new music discovery web series that I hope to develop further soon. My DVD collection is nowhere near as outrageous as my CD collection but I can assure you I’ve seen more movies to date than your average human will watch in their lifetime. These days my in-theater attendance has not been as frequent as in the past but being that I’m not far from Hollywoodland I try to take advantage of director Q&A’s, cast appearances and early test screenings whenever possible. I usually see about half a dozen national wide releases throughout the year but my main interests remain with the independent films you’ll find at Arclight, Landmark, Cinefamily, etc. Every year since 2002 I’ve attended the AFI Film Festival where I revel in the all-you-can-eat buffet of international films from noon until midnight for as many of the seven days as I can. Last, but certainly not least, there are the otters. Yes, the aquatic mammal that belongs to the same family as the weasel. I have been fascinated with otters since I was probably 8 or 9 yea