Runaway train

Alekz D. Londos is an independent filmmaker. He was born in Reno in 1980 but has developed a pretty cool goatee. His video, Psychosiis, is a little hard to explain. It focuses on the rough end of extreme sports, the faceplants. But it also includes random acts of violence, naked women and a killer soundtrack. The images are staccato, like bullets from an automatic weapon. Cool. Disturbing. Off. In fact, it’s a pretty good representation of Londos as a person. (He’s somewhat reminiscent of Jack Kerouac’s friend Dean Moriarty.) The DVD and other merch can be purchased through psychosiis.com. The video will show on SNCAT, Channel 16, at midnight on May 18 and 1 a.m. on May 21.

So tell me—

I just woke up. I guess I can handle this.

How did you get started in the video stuff?

That’s exactly where I was going to go with this. Down in Santa Cruz, I had a friend who was doing the whole community TV thing. We went down to the studio one time when I was 14 years old. I look back on it now and say, “Whoa, I was only 14.” Community access was one of the best things to happen to me. I ran one of my first live shows at the age of 14, where I was holding one of those really big cameras. Moving it around on the people for like a live show that was going through the TV station. That was really exciting for me, and then I got into that. Then a friend helped me produce my first video, which took me six months to make, but it actually was a really cool video. I don’t like some of the things in it, but watching it 10-15-however many years later—11 years later—I can still value some of the video shots and some of the BMX. I used to ride BMX. I used to be like really, really crazy. I used to be like—out of everybody in Santa Cruz I used to ride off—I mean I was invincible. I used to ride off roofs, and I never broke any bones. I used to pull huge tricks and build dirt-jump parks. I don’t know if you had a chance to read the Web site; one of the newspaper articles I was involved in—this place called “Oz” made it to the front page of the newspaper, and it was this huge jump. So I just used to ride a lot with friends, and we’d have these crews and go to the skate parks and everything, so I filmed and recorded this first video. I didn’t like a lot of stuff in the video; I just knew that I do so much more with editing because editing, moving clips around, I realized you could do absolutely anything with editing. So I started working on this next video. I never had a good video camera, but I did go through a lot of video tapes. I got into traveling, and I got into hiking and different places. I’m a pretty independent person when it comes down to extreme situations or putting myself in bad situations. I love living experiences. I love seeing something I’ve never seen before. I love hiking out. I love not knowing if I’m going to make it back from where I hiked to. Or how I’m going to get down off a cliff or how I got on a rock in the middle of the ocean—just different places that I’ll put myself into like train tracks and bad neighborhoods. I like living, and I like the uncertainty of not knowing where I’m going to end up the next day.

Right.

I’ve always had like really positive people in my life that have supported things that I do. They see my work and they’ve seen the way that I live and just the way I handle the presence of other people who’ve helped me out, too. I’ve valued the chance that I’ve had to live the life that I enjoy, the things that I enjoy doing, and filming at the same time—capturing that and then trying to create small fractions of that into a video that I put together.