Monster squad: Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios in Orlando is impressive. We expected lots of tools and candy corn. Instead, we got chainsaw swinging monsters.

For fans of Anne Rice who thought her literary prowess had begun to diminish in the novels following the vampire Lestat’s Dante-like voyage through heaven and hell in 1995’s Memnoch the Devil, her latest novel, Blackwood Farm, proves that the gods of supernatural literature have again bestowed her with the talented powers needed to create a sinfully engrossing narrative.

Blackwood Farm revolves around Tarquin Blackwood – an eccentric young man whose life carries the bizarre luggage of an invisible doppelganger named Goblin. Tarquin, who has been transformed into a vampire, narrates the novel to the iconic vampire Lestat. Tarquin’s haunting tale is well-paced, enabling the plot to quicken in an intensity similar to a vampire’s frenzied feeding and slow down to a luxuriant Southern tempo in all the necessary spots.

Tarquin can barely remember a time when he did not know Goblin. Tarquin’s family and their estate servants ignore his charades with the invisible Goblin. Yet, Tarquin and Goblin do nearly everything together: Tarquin teaches words to Goblin in grammar school until he is thrown out for “talking to nobody,” Goblin and Tarquin watch classic films together, Goblin makes chandeliers tremble in a jealous rage when Tarquin exits a room after conversing with another person, and eventually Goblin stimulates Tarquin to his first orgasm.

The first half of the novel revolves around the development of Tarquin and Goblin’s complex relationship and mirrors Tarquin’s sheltered upbringing. The second half of the novel offers a series of dynamic plot twists, particularly the ending, that reflect Tarquin’s growing independence from Goblin.

The riveting plot also focuses on Sugar Devil Island, where rumors are abound that the Blackwood patriarch, Manfred, built a clandestine shack in the swamp with many ancestral secrets. To quote a character from the novel incensed with strange happenings, “Lord God. We got a dead girl, a strange building, a bunch of weird books, and a regular tomb of gold with an empty coffin in it, and a crazy boy standing here!” The novel offers enough intrigue and suspense to keep any mystery reader satiated.

The work is seeped in thick Southern Gothic, and unlike many of her novels, the tales of ghosts, haunting nightmares, and bloodsucking are terrifying. Rice’s novels have a dark atmosphere permeating from them, but they offer more than just thrift store chills. She conveys the eternal theme of good versus evil in various ways: the philosophical ranting and navel-gazing of immortals, a subtle history lesson, a character’s yearning for love, and through an epic multi-generational family chronicle.

Blackwood Farm is noteworthy for its abundance of lively and sumptuous human characters. Rice is able to imbue these characters with a robust personality and charm that she has been unable to recreate since she first introduced her vampire brethren and witch coven. These include: Tarquin’s derelict of a country singer-poseur mother Patsy, the charismatic and extravagant Aunt Queen, the loving but distant grandfather Pops, the beautiful and sensible quadroon Jasmine, and family servants Clem and Big Ramona and others, that collectively flesh out Rice’s tale with a palpable vividness.

Although Blackwood Farm is billed as a “Vampire Chronicle,” it could also be considered a follow up to Rice’s Mayfair Witches trilogy.

One of the novel’s best features is that Rice spreads her appeal out to balance the tastes of her new and old fans. As opposed to several of her recent novels, a new reader can jump right into Rice’s world and feel comfortable. The novel enriches the paranormal legends Rice has worked on for several decades by bringing back many beloved characters (fans of the Mayfair family will be elated to know that Rowan, Michael, Mona, and Julien have returned to form) with fresh, contemporary scenarios. References to Wal-Mart, the FBI, and Gladiator, only serve to advance the verisimilitude these seemingly fabricated, romantic characters play in readers’ lives.

Rice’s love for the humanities has not eroded. Just as Rice is currently finding her place back in the Roman Catholic Church, her characters’ awestruck appreciation and ecstatic love for the Western World’s classic art, literature, and music is as prevalent as ever.

Blackwood Farm, like nearly all of Rice’s work, deserves a chance. Whether it is a quick peek or a close analysis, Blackwood Farm is like stepping into an enormous cathedral and absorbing the sublime trance of glorious stained-glass windows and every confessed sin.

Horacio Sierra can be reached at madnapo@aol.com.

show us your beads: Fantasy Fest was definitely worth the trip this year. You should the negatives. Look for a Life & Art uncensored DVD during commerical breaks on E!.

I had heard of Kid Koala before (the Chinese-Canadian DJ whose boys include Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Dan the Automator, Radiohead, and his band mates in Bullfrog). However, I could not remember listening to just him. Before Friday’s show at Power Studios, I decided to pick up his only full-length solo album, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, on the much-lauded label Ninja Tune Records. Its use of chicken samples and thoroughly warped turntable skills were enough to convince me to spend another 12 greenbacks to see Koala live.

His entire performance was a mission focused on “getting silly.” Koala was all smiles as he scratched away at tracks by Souls of Mischief, Radiohead, Cypress Hill, and the Beastie Boys, as the audience danced away however they could. During the show, various people entered the back stage area with little trouble – their heads nodding softly in the clouds. For once, it seemed like everyone was relaxed and unified – there was no security meathead hassle. Photographers and journalists munched on Koala’s complementary supply of carrots and fruits in peace, listening to him chop up beats like a friendly comic book superhero. For more info visit www.kidkoala.com.

This is a Life & Art interview with Kid Koala.

Q: What are you dressing up as for Halloween?
KOA: Probably a bag of chips or something – I’m DJing so I need to find something I can DJ in. I was trying on all these masks but I could not see anything. So, you know: A bag of chips.

Q: Would you ever do a soundtrack for some Koala porn videos?
KOA: Funny you should say that, I’m actually doing a soundtrack for graphic novel, not porno “graphic.” It’s like a romantic tragedy that’s coming out next year.

[Kid Koala scurries off to find a few of his drawings from a book that he drew and is doing the soundtrack for: it is 350 pages, 80 words]

KOA: It is like a paperback silent film.

Q: Speaking of soundtracks, what about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? (The album is accompanied by a 30-page comic book illustrated by Kid Koala)
KOA: Well, I wanted to express the same attention span in the comic book as in the music. This new book is more developed; it’s like a feature length movie. With the soundtrack, it’s not so much beats, but something that helps you flip through the pages, piano (from which I’d taken a really long hiatus) plus turntables.

Q: Why weren’t you in the Crocodile Hunter movie?
KOA: I think he’s more into the super-poisonous darth frogs.

Q: You are not “super-poisonous” or “darth?”
KOA: No, but I did get some letters saying that a lot of koalas were real active and have syphilis.

Q: Do you get any letters from the “Furries” (a growing population of people who like to dress up in animal costumes for sex)?
KOA: I’d never heard of that phenomenon until I came to Miami.

Q: Me neither. Would you DJ a furry orgy?
KOA: My music isn’t the sexiest. People look like little spazzes when they dance to it. To get in the mood I’d stick with Barry White or Marvin Gaye.

Q: When your nose is wet, does that mean you are sick?
KOA: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

Sven Barth can be reached at big_sven@hotmail.com.

According to studio estimates on Sunday afternoon, Jackass: The Movie grossed $22.7 million over the weekend, bottle rocketing it to number one on the nation’s box office charts and easily procuring its entire, skim $15 million budget. Johnny Knoxville, recently knighted a “megastar” by Time magazine, and the business -savvy brain behind this lucrative Operation: Danger, agreed to meet with Life & Art in the Gaucho Room of the swank Loews Miami Beach Hotel last Thursday to discuss all things Knoxville and Jackass.

When Sven Barth (UM Skateboard Club President) and I were escorted to the interview location (by two publicists and two jackass security guards), we came upon Knoxville, sitting slouched on a plush couch, wearing his (now signature) cut-off Dickies work pants, black Chuck Taylor All Stars, a blue hoody, and brown-tinted shades. Unlike Steve-O, Knoxville’s demeanor was serious and he worded his answers with a businessman’s discretion. Maybe he had been partying too hard with Wee Man and Preston at B.E.D and Club Deuce Bar & Grill the night before – maybe he had formed a similar prognosis about us. Overall, you can’t judge a person by a 30 minute chat, but in conclusion, we were left guessing whether he would stick to his guns (doubtful), pull a Jim Carrey and become a “serious, dramatic actor,” or worse, market himself as an aficionado of Wal-Mart rebellion.

Q: When you were in Japan filming for the movie, did MTV attempt to bug you every second to see how things were going?
JNX: Nah, Paramount and MTV Films were great on this, they pretty much let us go off. No one from MTV or Paramount was ever around.

Q: Will you ever go back to your real name P.J. Clapp or are you trying to avoid it?
JNX: No, I mean, it’s my name. I’m Johnny Knoxville.

Q: Is Johnny Knoxville as good a name as Winona Ryder?
JNX: I prefer Irving Schimmel (?) to those two names.

Q: What is the best cure for a hangover?
JNX: Each glass of booze you drink, drink a glass of water with it, and then take an Advil before you go to bed.

Q: After listening to so much punk rock, do you ever question being part of a mass marketing machine like MTV?
JNX: It was obviously cooler when we were doing skateboard videos, but when you make a decision to go with a big production company network, you do sacrifice that, but it’s seen by more people.

Q: What would you say your favorite bands are?
JNX: The Ramones, the Replacements, the Misfits, the Clash and I love Johnny Cash and David Bowie too.

Q: Since you have been rather successful, how important would you say a college education is?
JNX: That’s a personal preference. Obviously, you don’t need it to shoot yourself in the chest. I would go back every now and then, so who knows, I might do so.

Q: Do you see a big difference in being raised in Tennessee, and then going out to Hollywood or staying at a place like this in South Beach? When we were walking up to the hotel, these two fat security guards pretty much interrogated us…
JNX: Yeah, when I stay at hotels, and the security guards don’t recognize me, they ask me what I’m doing in the hotel and ask to see a room key.

Q: When you guys were doing Jackass, did you ever watch any of the videos that kids would send in (emulating their stunts, hence the heavy disclaimers)?
JNX: We never even saw the envelopes.

Q: When you working at Big Brother Skateboarding, did you ever meet Larry Flynt (the owner)?
JNX: Yeah, at this party in an airplane hanger I walked up to him, shook his hand and said “Nice to meet you,” but he was looking the other way, so he was pretty happy to meet me.

Q: How do Hustler parties compare to ones at the Playboy Mansion?
JNX: Playboy parties are more upscale, while the Hustler parties are more down ‘n’ dirty.

Q: What did you honestly think of Men in Black II?
JNX: Uhhhhhh. Ahhhhhmm. Yeah, it was fun. It was good.

Q: Are there any plans for a Jackass videogame? Would the objective be to have Steve-O coughing up a goldfish?
JNX: There are plans, yeah, but we’re just started to sit down with people. We should have made it a long time ago, but we don’t know what we’re doing.

Q: How often do you get propositions from girls?
JNX: I’m married, so…the boys do really good. Steve-O tries to see how long he can go without taking a bath and still get a girl, and it’s a long time. He fuckiing stinks. He reeks of perspiration, weed…and ass. Steve-O jumped into some really fucked water with a dead kitten in it, and got an infection, and I ended up getting it because I drank after him.

Q: Is the NC-17 DVD for the Jackass movie still coming out?
JNX: No, [Paramount] won’t allow it. We kept the film to 90 minutes, so there’s a lot of good bits that didn’t make it in.

Q: So the movie is what you can’t see on television, and the DVD is what you can’t see in the movie?
JNX: Noooooo. The movie is in the same tone as the movie.

Q: Was it always your dream to become a movie star?
JNX: No, I was more interested in writing a novel (he never finished it), but I love what I’m doing.

Hunter Stephenson can be reached at hurricaneaccent@hotmail.com.

YES YOKO ONO, an art retrospective which opened last Friday at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, is a command, a gesture and an invitation from a feminist in her most pure and powerful mode. Coming out of the Fluxus movement in the sixties and never didactic, angry or political, Ono pioneered methods of conceptual art through the progression of medium, idea, and especially spirit.

Her work transcends historical significance by speaking to the innate human condition. One of her most celebrated pieces, “Play It By Trust,” is a series of all-white chessboards and, after a few moves in the interactive piece-the common person is allowed to touch it-the rest of the game takes place inside the mind. In the eighties, she sent a piece to different world leaders including Ronald Reagan and she is a strong evoker of the primacy of language in her art. In “Painting in Three Stanzas,” (1962) the viewer is invited to construct the painting from the verbal instructions that are given in the calligraphy, which was done by Ono’s first husband-thus taking the authorship out of the process.

Born to an aristocratic family, Yoko Ono’s early training in Japan was in music and her future husband, John Lennon, said that she has a “16-track voice.” Her musical experience gave her a language that translated into all forms of visual art and, just as good music is not specific to a culture or history, Ono’s art is not for an American or an Asian-it is for a world citizen. Speaking at a press conference at MoCA on how she balanced the Western paradigm of art functioning for the individual to the Eastern perspective of approaching art as communitarian supply, Ono stated that in the West an artist attempts to “make something unique,” while the Eastern artist is “communing with the universe” at large.

Embedded in all her work is the idea of balance. “Half-A-Room” (1967) is an “autobiographical” piece incorporating altered ready-made furniture. At a first glance, it calls to mind Dada-esque images of Duchamp’s reaction to pretentious ideas of “high art.” She took objects from her dank London apartment, cut them all in half and painted them white. She was inspired when she woke up one morning and her lover was not there in bed beside her-“Half” then speaks to the Eastern cultural asset of duality, yet it utilizes Western objects. “Somebody said I should also put half a person in the show,” she said, “but we are halves already.”

Humor and deep lighting pervade the entire show and the sky appears as one of Ono’s favorite metaphors, representing infinite possibility. Moreover, her performance pieces prod through boundaries and offer more leeway, rising above artistic limits. Her “Cut Piece,” displayed here as a film, communicates vulnerability through a looming female perspective. Ono sits on the floor and the audience is asked to use the scissors lying beside her to cut away the black blouse and dress adorning her. Motionless yet uneasy, she sits like a quiet sage allowing the universe to take its course. At this point she had not even met John Lennon and this piece now seems prophetic on how the media and American culture would respond to this powerfully subtle Asian woman apparently “stealing” John Lennon away from his boy’s club by simply falling in love with him.

Another performance piece was done in collaboration with Lennon. Following their marriage in March of 1969, the public was in their face so much that they decided to publicize their honeymoon. They called it “Bed In for Peace.” The press called it a press conference, yet it is arguably one of the most public, interactive, far-reaching performance pieces in art history.

In light of contemporary events, Ono’s works become more relevant at each stop along the exhibition tour. This weekend, the “sniper(s)” was allegedly caught, military troops are about to advance into Iraq for a preemptive U.S. strike and peace demonstrations took place in most major cities around the world on Saturday. Peace is on the brink of failure and Yoko Ono can be a pacifying catalyst of positive energy.

“While we are arguing that the war industry will win, it is important to keep the peace industry moving,” she explained. Recalling an excerpt from a book that stated, “in the 20th Century, 60 million civilians and 40 million soldiers were killed” in war, she added: “We need to keep being creative [and] give the metronome back to society.”

In her early compilation volume, Grapefruit, she instructs to “steal all of the clocks and watches in the world. Destroy them.” Her piece “Eternal Time” (1965) is a battery-run gilded clock with only a second hand and hanging from the plexiglas pedestal is a stethoscope-the work speaks to the idea of natural rhythms. When asked how she interpreted the art of hip hop culture, she declared it to be a positive reaction to civil rights. “People are angry,” she said, “[and] art is that kind of energy. If it sits, anger kills.”

An interactive prayer for world peace, “Wish Tree” (1996/2001) is a living tree in a container with wish tags on strings. She asks the viewer to write a wish on a tag and hang it on the tree and this work has drawn in thousands of participants in each separate installation. Currently considering to make a massive piece compiling all the wishes, she announced at MoCA that she “hope[s] one day you’ll join us and the world will be as one.” Though these are Lennon’s words, Yoko Ono has the encompassing love of a wise grandmother and the macho tact of the best CEO to effectively work within society to make a change.

“We are alchemists of the finest kind,” she added. “Humans have the potentiality to be the finest race.” Yoko’s work muses on the idea that positive energy will produce positive results. When her work is interpreted as a “one liner” in that it is simple, one misses the point-the power lies in its ability to present itself in a welcoming fashion that does more to ask hard questions of the viewer than present any sort of naOve feminine optimism. To feel the power of her art, one must first open up to the possibility that it might really work.

YES YOKO ONO runs through January 26 at MoCA, 770 N.E. 125th St. North Miami. Call 305-893-6211 for more info.

Alex Saleeby can be reached at claysaleeby@hotmail.com

Do all New York filmmakers express a similar distaste for the lack of quality and emphasis on making money in Hollywood? Veteran and peculiar comedy director, Woody Allen, recently proclaimed his aversion towards the west coast filmmaking bastion, explaining at a promotional stop in Rome for his new movie Hollywood Ending, that “[Hollywood] is a place where people spend a huge amount of money and yet make very few, if any, decent films.” He also stressed the significance of older European films: “[They] were so much more original, rich and imaginative, and they really contributed to the development of cinema as an art form.” Yet Allen isn’t boosting his ego as a film man and described himself instead in a self-deprecating manner: “In three words, I would say: A Failed Artist. I’m very, very mediocre. In fact, I’m less than mediocre.”Well, he could have just been sucking up to reporters perhaps.

Queensbridge rapper Nas doesn’t feel pampered by the success of his last album, Stillmatic, and is in the studio finishing up his next LP, God’s Son, which features the sinuous handiwork of producers Alchemist, Large Professor, Salaam Remi And L.E.S. However, though the release date was scheduled for November 19, it was pushed back to December 17. His first single, “Made You Look!” has been playing on urban radio airwaves and Nas finished shooting a video for the song last week.

Many Americans may not be aware of the political overtones in U2’s hit “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” but the song is much more an irate musical retort to the gruesome events of Jan. 30, 1972 (when 13 Irish civilians were murdered in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, by British paratroopers during a civil rights march) than just a catchy pop tune. Bloody Sunday, a new film by British director Paul Greengrass, recalls these events and displays them to fans of the U2 buzz hit. Greengrass notes that the movie is about understanding the incident: “There was no anger, no bitterness, no cause for vengeance, just a quiet dignity and a feeling that at last, a necessary story had been told.” The film opened in L.A. and will make the rounds in major U.S. cities.

British rock stars battled it out for the prestigious Q Magazine awards, with Radiohead winning the “Best Act in the World Today” award for the second year running. Other winning bands included Coldplay, Sugababes and the Hives, but usual victors, Oasis, walked away empty-handed.