Shezad Dawood: When people ask me questions about magic or shamanism or particular life experiences, I try to maintain a cover of plausible deniability. Does that make sense?
Eric Leeds: From what I understand, Stevie Wonder did.
Dawood: There's the research, there's the intuition.
Leeds: Yeah, we would do that occasionally. It’s not real.
Dawood: That opens up a generous proposition to the audience.
***
Leeds: There was an awful lot of laughter in those days.
Dawood: It somehow segued into film.
Leeds: Oh, absolutely! Absolutely!
Dawood: (laughter) I like to think of not creating an oppositional framework.
Leeds: You know, this is probably the way it was meant to be.
***
Dawood: Interestingly, in his diaries there's a whole record of his daughter bugging him to go and visit this famous Constable country and so he organizes a trip with her and she turns around—he records this in a journal entry—and says, "But, Daddy, it's just fields."
Leeds: In those days, yes, he was very quiet and very private in that manner. I didn't see him or talk to him.
Dawood: That image has been staked. So you arrived at these cyborg textiles, with all these cultural juxtapositions or mutations happening.
Leeds: We have no idea, for instance, what an old John F. Kennedy would have been.
Dawood: I’d agree with you there.