Persona: Alexis Mincolla

August 22, 2008 8:21 PM
by

It's exciting for any journalist when your subject is escorted by security staff to your offices front door. While Alexis Mincolla is only a part-time murderer in the YouTube 'movies', as it were, his appearance, in the words of the man himself - is just "nefarious" enough to get him into trouble for no good reason. He might be a little intimidating, but once you get past the fact that he's 6'2, sports a mean 'stache and walks around with a sword disguised as a cobra cane...no, he's still pretty intimidating.

As the creative mind behind Bella Rose's "Black Sunday" party, Alexis Mincolla has re-established himself as the host with the most with the more seasoned of party-goers. A man of many hats - though you may have only ever seen him wearing a black fedora - Mincolla has his finger dipped in every cookie jar - from the world of mock musical groups to real life practical ingenuity. Alexis or Lex Mincolla is one well-rounded weirdo.

Name: Alexis Van Ess Mincolla

Age: 26

Occupation: That's a tough one...Serial entrepreneur, Creative Director and as of recently, I guess a night life host in Miami Beach.

Where do you come from? Boston originally. I moved to Rome, Italy and lived there for about four years and then ended up chasing a Venezuelan girl to Miami Beach.

What's musically exciting to you right now? That's tough. I'm so disenchanted with so much music out there right now. I know it sounds strange but I still like death metal a lot. It's the one music that remained pure to me, no one is pretending to like death metal. People come to my apartment and say 'Why do you listen to this shit?', but I genuinely like it. My brother has a big death metal band called Dysentery, they've toured all over the country and they're going to Japan for the Tokyo Death Fest, so really, I grew up with it.

What’s your favorite place in Miami? Bella Rose.

What do you wish Miami had more of? People who actually do stuff.

Less of? People who say that they're doing stuff.

Where do you run away to? I guess that would be my apartment. It's kind of a secret location.

How long have you lived here? I think it's been three and a half, four years. Something like that.

Did you have a favorite party that's no longer with us? I never really had any allegiances to specific parties. I would just kind of go where the flow was. Spiderpussy, Black Lipstick, I never really cared.

What’s your favorite party right now? Sunday, Black Sunday (smiles).

How did the concept for Black Sunday build? Bella Rose is right next door to my place, Alfred and Keith are great guys. Katie Wolland, she's actually a casting director for Elite Models, she introduced me to them. At that point it was myself, Leemore (Rhodes) and Katie and we had this idea to throw a night this summer. We said 'let's make it totally antithetical to everything else that's going on'. So, they let me kind of have free reign of a toy factory - 'Just do whatever you want Lex, come back with it and we'll either give it the thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Sounds like a good time. I just kind of went back to my think tank of an apartment and just started cooking up ideas as far as what is at the complete opposite of the spectrum of a Sunday night in Miami Beach. Okay, you have these sun-soaked, white linen kind of dance parties down at Nikki Beach, which make me want to vomit, so touristy. I thought, let's just make it the exact opposite of the spectrum - Black Sunday. It's actually an old horror movie that came out in the '60s by this Italian director, Mario Bava.

Very 'Addams Family'. I just wanted to make it a creepy pop murder night. See how many kinds of degenerates you can get at a party on a Sunday night, first off. It's a late crowd. People that come to my party, I don't know what they do for a living, but they stay out until four in the morning on a Sunday. I know it kind of beats me up the next day but I love it. It's a real crowd. Saturday night, everyone goes out. It's amateur night. The people who are actually gonna do a Sunday night, those are people who know how to party.

Do you fee like you've created some Sunday night competition? Well, I think the only other party that happens near by is Sundance at SET and that's a totally different crowd. We're not really competing with that. We're just giving a little something different to Miami Beach.

Your online promoting strategies have been pretty interesting. Do you think YouTube will start to play a more important role for marketing parties? I don't think of it as promoting. I'm not trying to get people to go to my party, I'm just doing it for the people who actually go to the party already. Bella Rose only fills in about 100 people. I know everyone that comes to the party, it's our thing. We don't need it to get any bigger. If you wanna come out and join us, that's fine, but I wouldn't say it's a marketing tool for the party.

Well, it's definitely caught on. I just wanted to give a party an after-product other than just a hang over. So, come Monday or Tuesday, everyone is saying 'where's the video? I wanna see me', you know. So, maybe it is in an afterthought marketing. There's really none of that behind it. We don't flier the party, we don't really do anything. It's our thing, it's kind of like a big party in your living room with a big bar.

So is it sort of an extension of the horror movie concept that someone is murdered in every video? There's gonna be a murder at every party. I don't know if you saw the last one but we have the little hand that went around the whole party. It's just a creepy, silly party at the end of the day. As dumb as that sounds.

How do you choose who gets murdered? It's funny, I have a list of people that want to be killed. I'm booked for murders up until November at this point. Everyone wants to be murdered. As far as choosing people, it's been a first come, first served thing. Whoever makes the most sense. Sometimes people flake because it's Miami (mock sick voice) 'Oh, I'm sorry I can't make it, I'm so tired from Saturday night' in which case I've got someone waiting in the wings.

How do you keep the party interesting for your regulars? It's all so on the fly. None of it is contrived. I think that's what keeps it interesting. We never know what spin it's gonna take. I don't even know what spin it's gonna take until I start editing it. Until I start seeing the footage that we have, whatever Stian and Charis come up with. They see things and they get it and sometimes I'm directing them to capture certain things. Other than that - sometimes I wake up and want to edit it with some metal, sometimes I'll use some electro, depending on the murder I did. I'm not storyboarding. I think, alright, let's do death-ray vision and I knew I wanted to do a decapitation. I keep setting this new standard for myself, from here on out I always have to outdo the one that came before. It puts a lot of pressure on me but, let's see what happens.

We'll see how sick you can get. I have people requesting various ways they'd like to be murdered and I'm just thinking 'I don't know if we're ready for that yet'.

You developed a following for a while with one of your alter-ego's. (Laughs) that's Ayrwulf, Ayrwulf is a completely different animal. It was actually myself and a business partner of mine and we cooked up this crazy idea that we called Ayrwulf. We wanted to make this living mockumentary of an electronic music group from the future, for whatever reason. We wanted to make "Spinal Tap" and play it out here in Miami Beach and see how many people would believe it. I was the red guy, my name was Samurai. I had creepy long hair, a Samurai bandanna and a red jumpsuit. We had a yellow guy named Sol and a blue guy named Grandma and we were all missing our lead singer.

How'd you lose him? This was the story - we all came for Winter Music Conference and we lost our lead singer Gusto, who was actually really just the yellow guy in a Wig and different glasses. No one knew that, everyone would say 'Oh My God! You're missing him, that's so fucked up! I've heard of you guys'. We took the name from a bad '80s television show, we just switched the way we spelled it around, so people thought they recognized it. The next thing you know, people are inviting us out to host parties and we were running around with our own crew of 20 people with photographers and everyone thought we were some famous band. We actually have an album out on iTunes, I think it's shit music but people buy it. For some reason, people love us in Iceland.

You have Icelandic fans? We have a huge fan base in Iceland. There's a hardcover book too, you can buy that as well. There's a flickr slide show, you can see god-knows-what on there.

So, is this the real Lex? Who is the real Lex?You know, I don't know what that means. At the end of the day, my personas are kind of just a little extension of myself. I just like creating culture and if that has to do with me stepping into a certain character that's an extension of my personality, I guess that's what it takes.

What's one of the weirder gigs that you've taken? Well, this is pretty strange. I'm pretty much killing people. That's about as strange as it gets.

Being a host in Miami is already pretty strange. It is really strange. The stuff that goes on in those bathrooms...if those walls could speak...soaked in blood.

Name a goal of yours you've achieved recently. Well, I'm launching a company. It's a very high end health elixir - Prometheus Springs. We've got all the market traction together with it but, I have three companies right now (laughs). One called Frank Steel Enterprises, one called Industrial Alchemy Kitchen and Prometheus Springs, all of which are incorporated but none of them has really come to fruition yet. So, I'd say that's kind of my accomplishment there.

What is Frank Steel Enterprises? I'd love to tell you about it but my attorney would probably freak out. Real quick and simple, we hold two patents on the world's first modular water bottle. It's a water bottle that you don't throw away and you don't recycle. You can actually build with it. It's a pretty heavy project.

And Industrial Alchemy Kitchen? That's kind of been just a....who knows what that is. I don't even know what that is. It's a think tank, it's the thing that kind of spawned all the other projects.

What's on the horizon for Lex? There are rumors of a reality television show. I'm probably not supposed to be talking about it but...there are rumors of a reality show ready to hit Miami Beach.

Click here to read and see more of Black Sunday and Alexis Mincolla. Check out Black Sunday this and every Sunday at Bella Rose nightclub.