I didn’t believe the past world was better than my present-day life, but I connected to—aspired to—the glamour, the iconic images, which seemed unimpeachable and monolithic. There was a stillness about the past, a clarity, the way it had been somewhat defined and dissected, in the rearview mirror; it was there for the taking, for the mining. The old songs, the old movies, the black-and-white pictures created a visual and aural time machine.
