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Not content as one of the world’s foremost cartoonists (don’t call her a graphic novelist—she loathes that designation), Marjane Satrapi has now made the leap into directing movies, starting with an animated adaptation of her highly acclaimed Persepolis. This modestly budgeted film is a brilliant hybrid of black-and-white and color, fable and memoir, at turns hilarious, deeply moving, and sad. (It is also France’s official selection for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.) The story concerns the young Marjane reminiscing about her childhood in Tehran during the transitional years between the Shah’s oppressive régime and the leadership of the equally oppressive Ayatollah Khomeini. Satrapi is gregarious and wonderfully opinionated, and also a proud smoker: the venue for our interview was changed so that she could puff away freely in her hotel room.

You had tremendous success with both Persepolis and its followup, Persepolis 2. What made you want to make a movie?

I always thought it was the worst idea in the world to turn Persepolis into a movie. That’s probably why we made a good one—we knew all the dangers. A friend of mine who is a producer wanted me to turn this into a picture, so I told him that I wanted it filmed in Paris, that I wanted Catherine Deneuve, I wanted it hand drawn and mostly in black and white, that I wanted this and I wanted that. And he said yes to everything! So I thought, “Shit, now I have to do it.” It was like diving into the water and realizing you can’t swim.

Now that the results are satisfactory, of course I can invent 256 good reasons to have made Persepolis. But the reality is that there was no good reason from the beginning.

If there’s any disappointment I had about Persepolis, it was realizing certain scenes in the book were absent from the film, great scenes. But obviously you’re not going to make a four-hour movie …

There’s sixteen years of my life to try and condense, and so you have to choose a focus. At the time we started writing the script I was feeling very nostalgic. I hadn’t been back to Iran for five years. That’s why the movie is based on the exile. If I made Persepolis today, I would be less nostalgic and the turning point would be something else and we would have focused on some other story. It’s a question of choice.

There was a great sequence where your father is telling a young Marjane the story of how the Shah came to power. The scene is reminiscent of puppetry …

Yes. We had to find ways to tell the story without it being a “historical” film. I don’t have the pretension to be the historian of Iran. Whatever is about history uses these puppet-like scenes. We wanted to use different narration to communicate different things.

You have mentioned that you are interested in the filmmaker F.W. Murnau and German Expressionism, and I noticed that some of the castles in your movie have that look of foreboding, as in Murnau’s Nosferatu.

I wanted to take from something that moved me, that was brilliant—like Nosferatu. I can still go and watch that and feel that it is so modern, it moves me today. That movie is from 1922! If they could watch my movie in eighty years and think it was still modern, I’d be happy.

Do you go back to Iran?

I could go back, but then I couldn’t get out. My parents are there, and they visit me in France. Me, myself, I’d have some problem. I am not a brave one—people say what I say in Iran and they end up in jail. They write articles, not comics, and they end up in prison and tortured. I’m in Paris …

Can you buy Persepolis in Iran?

Yes, especially the English version. Because of course in Iran if we speak a second language it’s English, not French anymore. English is the new Esperanto, which I really like. Some people complain “Oh, this is English culture,” but this is Esperanto. Everyone can speak this language, what does it matter. It’s a good thing whether it’s English or German or Japanese, if we all speak the same language it’s a good thing.

One of the scenes that impressed me, both in the film and the books, was where you were homeless in Vienna and calling your parents for help. You tell them, “I’ll come home but don’t ask any questions.” Obviously when they read Persepolis they found out about your sleeping in the park and almost dying—what was their reaction?

Well, they read it in 2004 and I had left Vienna in 1988. That was sixteen years. And my mother was having a heart attack and my father was crying from this! I said to myself “Thank God I didn’t tell them sixteen years ago, they would have died!”

This story is not just a story of your reaction to political events but a personal story of depression and heartbreak. Is this something addressed in Iran?

Yes, absolutely. I get letters from around the world and in Iran from people telling me that I gave them hope. Adolescents especially. Of course I get notes from people telling me that this never happened, that never happened, but of course it did.

What do you think about Iranian President Ahmadinejad claiming that there are no gays in Iran?

If homosexuals are a symbol of a weak society then we have no strong society, because gays are everywhere. The only thing is that in some countries they are persecuted and killed and in others they’re left alone. For me, the reason some people don’t like gays is because of religion. Religion doesn’t like sex. Between a man and a woman sex is OK because you can create babies. Between gays sex is only for pleasure. That’s the same reason why we don’t show the sexuality of women that are in menopause. It is not because they are not desirable. Today many women of fifty are very desirable. The thing is, after fifty you cannot get pregnant, so if you fuck only for pleasure that is a big “No, No, No, No!” Besides, how can you not like gays?

As a smoker, what will you do if the threatened ban in France on smoking in cafés comes through?

I agree not every place should be a smoking place, but I’m a grown-up, leave me alone. For me, smoking is the symbol for what is going on in the world. We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the shit we eat—not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it’s AIDS. Jesus Christ, before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there’s the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of [me] going under a truck, that’s fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don’t want to eat me. Fuck the worms.

Speaking of gore, there’s a crazy sense of humor in your work. In the Persepolis book there’s a young man in a wheelchair who’s lost his arm and seen his friends blown to pieces, and yet he can tell a raunchy joke about a kid who was blown apart. Is this a cultural thing or just something that affects your friends and family?

People that complain—and you see this a lot in Western society, they go to the shrink and complain—do so to the level of your sadness. It becomes unbearable. Eventually you have to laugh or become consumed by it. You have to spit it out with laughter. That was our way of doing it. I am a serious person but I don’t take life seriously. How serious can it get? I was born stupid, and the day I have enough experience to live is the day I have to die. This is crap! So you see, life is a big joke!

Persepolis opens in the Twin Cities at the Uptown Theatre on January 18.

Darfur, Minnesota, population 137, doesn’t have a newspaper or a café, but news still gets around. Ask at the bank, and they’ll show you the town’s hundred-year anniversary publication, which lists the history and members of every club, business, and family who’s been here since 1903. And if there’s important news for everyone in town, they just print it on the water bill. Still, before 2003, it’s doubtful that many people here knew that their town shared a name with a region in western Sudan. “It’s strange seeing our name on the news,” said Ione Elg, who, at eighty, has lived all her life in Darfur, about 45 miles west of Mankato. Her sentiment generally reflected that of some twenty other Darfuris who were sharing morning coffee recently at City Hall.

Since the café closed four years ago, this daily get-together has been taking place in the large room next to the mayor’s office; someone volunteers to start the coffee, others bring treats, and there’s a basket for donations to help cover costs. Some people drive five miles just to share coffee and news. The men and women sit at different tables, each caught up in their own conversations—a separation of the sexes being at least one commonality between the two Darfurs. Elg continued: “I was surprised I’d never heard about the other Darfur before.” There were more nods. It was a little strange to refer to a place the size of Texas as “the other Darfur,” but what else would you call it?

In the Twin Cities, where the main connection with Sudan is via the internet, the Genocide Intervention Network has raised thousands of dollars for peacekeeping efforts; last fall, that group and another nonprofit, Doctors Without Borders, each set up mock refugee camps in public parks. No such fundraisers or demonstrations were taking place in Darfur, where, as Elg pointed out, the weekly attendance at Bethlehem Lutheran is only thirty people, including three kids in Sunday school. Most residents are farmers or retired farmers. There was a drought on. They were not disconnected from news of other international conflicts—“We Support Our Troops” signs welcomed four local National Guard members, two from Darfur, recently returned from Iraq—but many people here were far more knowledgeable about the issues of their community (the new town septic tank to be installed, for example) and devoted to making it run better. Sitting in the city hall, eating homemade lemon cake, the Sudanese Darfur and its government-backed genocide felt far away indeed.

Darfur, Minnesota reportedly got its name for that reason: “We have to go da fur?” a Swede is said to have scoffed before boarding the train. Or perhaps a railroad worker complained, “What’re we stoppin’ dere fur?”

For those who weren’t born in Darfur, that was the general first impression. Bernie Mogler, one of the generally recognized keepers of oral history, arrived with her new husband in 1945; she recalled that if she’d had the money for a return ticket, she would have gone straight back to Connecticut. But Darfur has a way of getting inside you. The former town constable recently turned ninety, and there was a big celebration. Mogler, in her eighties, can walk nearly everywhere she needs to go. She’s never been back east.

In Sudan, Darfur means “land of the Fur,” the largest ethnic group in the region and one of three that has been systematically terrorized. Sitting by the grain elevator in the Minnesotan Darfur, it’s hard to imagine this village being attacked by rebels on horseback or by truckloads of men armed by the government. It feels a little twisted to try to picture people walking, exhausted and starving, to Comfrey, Butterfield, Mountain Lake, or fleeing to overburdened refugee camps in South Dakota or Iowa. Meanwhile, in Sudan, the continuing devastation is visible via Amnesty International’s “Eyes on Darfur” campaign, which allows internet users to watch over at-risk villages via satellite cameras. Look up “Darfur” on Google Earth and you can click on individual villages for updated body counts and photographs of a scorched-earth policy in action.

In a more peaceful time, it would be easy to imagine villagers in the overseas Darfur discussing topics similar to the ones bandied about over coffee here in City Hall: whether there would be enough water for crops, plans to check in on So-and-So that day, recipes, episodes of remember-when—the sort of casual, even idle conversation, in other words, that people are free to indulge in when no one is threatening their lives.

Echo Bodine, a south Minneapolis psychic, sees it in people’s auras. She sees it in the number of angels and spiritual guides hovering around the living (“So many!”). She sees it in the number of calamities and catastrophes, and the number of people laid off, divorced, and dying.

According to Bodine these signs all point to a massive metaphysical shift, when the Mayan calendar, after 1,872,000 days, runs down (and out), on December 21, 2012. The date will be preceded by a rare astrological alignment: The sun will cross the galactic equator on the winter solstice, an occurrence that happens 30 times every 26,000 years.

“There’s going to be a big push in the next five years to clean up our karma,” Bodine told a crowd of roughly seventy-five at the Minneapolis Convention Center in November. The audience members paid 36 dollars to hear her speak at the annual Edge Life Expo. “There’s a high level of anxiety and turmoil in the atmosphere, it’s very intense. A lot of people are saying that 2012 is going to be the end of the world, but I would say it is the end of the world as we know it now.”

Bodine, fifty-nine, claims to have done her first healing in 1965, when she placed two hankies on her father’s forehead and cured his migraine. At the Expo, she looked like she was battling one herself. Her mannerisms and expressions were very tense—at one point she looked startled, and she explained that a spirit had grabbed her arm. Her hair, streaked with gray at the temples, was brushed back into a well-styled coif. She signaled to her assistant to turn up the lute music, then launched a group meditation.

After Bodine’s session, the crowd of mostly middle-aged women flowed out into the main rooms for the Expo, where they could get their chakras balanced, past lives cleared, animal spirits counseled, akashic records revealed, and auras painted in bright watercolors. More than 150 exhibitors had set up karmic booths, hoping to shake a few dollars out of the cosmos with their singing bowls, pendulums, silver-plated jewelry, and crystal prisms. Most reported doing very well; over the course of three days, 11,000 people would wander through the Expo’s exhibits.

In the middle of one aisle, an Iraq vet was hanging out at the Hemi-Sync booth, selling CDs that promise to alleviate sleeplessness, ADHD, and emotional trauma through “evocative sounds and specially blended frequencies.” When pressed about how the CDs work, the vet admitted, “I’m just standing here for a friend. But if you want something that really works, you should get a copy of The Secret.”

The University of Metaphysical Sciences booth was draped with Christmas lights and ropes of fake ivy, promising a bachelor’s degree in metaphysics with six weeks of written and audio lessons, followed by a master’s degree that, according to the brochure, “leads to creating a more professional image for your books, classes, practice, and other endeavors.” One booth was selling “Premium North Dakota Golden Flaxseed.” Another, carved emblem necklaces made of “genuine mammoth ivory, 14,000 to 40,000 years old.”

Deep in the sea of booths, Eric Waite, a 23-year-old from Lakeville, was handing out pamphlets and spreading the word about Maitreya, one of the purported “Masters of Wisdom” who is expected to hold a worldwide press conference (“probably within the next two years,” according to Waite) and communicate to all the peoples of the world, in their own language. “When that happens, everything in the world is going to be better,” insisted Waite, who was fresh-faced and clearly full of hope.

Waite, like the others in “Transmission Meditation” groups (held each week in Lakeville, Mankato, St. Paul, and Waseca) get their marching orders from a British New Age futurist named Ben Creme, best known for sending out a rash of videotapes to journalists during the millennial panic. Creme’s website, www.share-international.org, documents Maitreya sightings. For what it’s worth, the all-knowing entity has made appearances as a man in bicycle shorts in Baltimore, as a woman with golden hair in New York, and as a character in a white robe and red socks, sitting in front of the Bulgari jewelry store in Beverly Hills.

Edge Life Expo producer Gary Beckman isn’t necessarily a Maitreya follower, but he certainly believes in the 2012 phenomenon. It’s a topic he’d like to see his magazine, Edge Life (“the premier monthly magazine on holistic living in the Upper Midwest”), cover more thoroughly. Beckman’s a former computer salesman from Coon Rapids, and he foresees more workshops on 2012 at future Edge Life Expos, as well as at his newest holistic expo ventures in Fargo and Des Moines. “We’re helping to make people happier and we’re sharing some real good, clean spirituality that is not God-fearing, but God-loving,” wrote Beckman in the September 2007 issue of The Edge.

If the world did collapse in 2012, it would presumably be at the crest of a massive wave in sales for holistic products and services, which would make it sort of the ultimate good news/bad news scenario for people like Beckman.

That first hit made my brain tingle. And so, a few days later, I found myself reaching again for the can of enriched oxygen—just a few huffs before heading to the gym. Normally, those initial minutes of exercise are somewhat skull-rattling. On this occasion, however, I bounced along the cushioned surface of a gentle high, as if my heavy head had somehow emptied, as if I’d resumed that habit from junior high: sucking sweet, buoying helium whenever I got the chance.

Contributing to this giddiness was the fact that Oxygen Plus, a new line of locally produced, concentrated oxygen-in-a-can, is so fashionably packaged. The O+Mini aerosol, a highly portable four-inch can that comes in metallic blue (peppermint-scented) and metallic pink (grapefruit) varieties, resembles a tiny can of Aqua Net. Then there’s the O+Stick: This foot-long refillable dispenser (made of recyclable aluminum) has a smooth, white surface and curved edges, and sort of resembles a vibrator. So long as these cutesy covetables were packed in the purse, I found, the party would go wherever I did.

But the market isn’t always kind to such far-out products, and so, over the next three weeks, I shared Oxygen Plus with a variety of subjects in hopes of finding fellow enthusiasts (thus ensuring the stability of my supply from the manufacturer, Oxygen Plus, Inc., which is based in Mahtomedi). My first guinea pig was a close friend, a classically trained singer in her mid-thirties eager to try the stuff: “I breathe for a living” is how Andrea put it over a recent lunch. “It says three to five hits,” she said, examining the dosage instructions on a pink O+Mini. After an initial squirt, administered as one would a blast of Binaca, she observed: “Boy, it really does smell like grapefruit.” Two sprays and fifteen seconds later, she remarked: “I’m waiting for something to happen.” Five minutes later she reported that, in fact, she had felt nothing.

The marketed benefits of huffing Oxygen Plus are not unlike those purported by Oxynate, the recreational oxygen bar at the Mall of America: relaxation, increased energy and alertness, relief from headaches and sinus problems, and improved performance for athletes. But time and time again, and much to this devotee’s chagrin, test subjects, including friends, family, and random passersby, were resistant to the oxygen’s charms. Subsequent trials on office mates, in the foyer of my apartment building, and even at the finish line of the Monster Dash half-marathon were equally discouraging. “But it can’t be a bad thing,” offered one of the random subjects, a thirty-nine-year-old businessman encountered at Uptown’s Green Mill Restaurant and Bar on a Saturday night. “I mean, you can’t get too much oxygen.”

One of Oxygen Plus’s claims—that it’s an effective tonic after a night of heavy drinking— went untested. But one thing is certain: Oxygen Plus provides a healthy, or at least harmless, way to indulge illicit fantasies; when used in public places, it was observed that decent, law-abiding citizens can get nostalgic for youthful delinquency by stealing a puff. Indeed, several subjects made the association with magic herbs, even if they didn’t say so expressly. When a thirty-eight-year-old IT guy was offered Oxygen Plus at a party one evening, he took his hit as if he were, in fact, toking a spliff. He inhaled very deeply, then held the peppermint-scented, enriched oxygen in his lungs for several seconds before finally letting it go in a long, slow exhale. Did that make a difference? Nope, he said, he never got his high.