Hello readers and friends,
Happy news to share: I quit my job as a Senior Communications Strategist after seven years, and I’m taking a sabbatical! However, the upheaval has caused some disruption to The Ick publishing schedule.
As a thank you for your patience, please savor this tasty bonus content during the intermission. More coming soon in July!
How to Hear Bonus
How to appreciate classical music
Do you struggle to “get” classical music? My expert interviewee for How to Hear, Reb (aka @soundrotator), is a choir director and composer, and she had excellent advice on how to better understand this richly complex genre.
“People who try to get into classical music in their adulthood don't have any guidance. They'll type Mozart into YouTube or Spotify or whatever, and have to go through piles and piles of terrible recordings. If you don't know which performers you like, it's a total gamble. And so you'll get some people who sound like a midi recording. They sound like shit, it's totally unrelatable.
“The thing about classical music that is fundamentally different than any other genre is that none of the original composers or performers of this style are alive. There’s so much interpretation happening blindly. Bach is a good example because if you listen to the fugues, it’s a really specific organization of musical tones, rhythmically and pitch-wise. It can often be the hardest to find an emotional relationship to because it can feel very mechanistic.
“But a great performer of Bach knows where the melodies are and makes it very obvious. A great performer guides the ear. So if you have a shitty performer, you've got a shitty guide. It's going to sound like notes and chords, sure, but it doesn't feel like it means anything. And that's what a lot of people experience when they try to get into classical music for the first time. It doesn't feel relatable. It doesn't feel meaningful. You can't hear the shape of the melody or the way that it has tension and release.
“If someone was a huge Bob Dylan fan, and they showed me a beautiful Dylan song, and then I found that same song, but it was a cover by Taylor Swift, they'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. That's not the song that we were listening to. That’s a completely different thing. The interpretation of a song from performer to performer can be radically different, and totally shift your ability to relate to the music.
“I'm really picky about the performers that I listen to. My best advice for someone struggling to relate to classical music is to find performers who really open up the music for you. If you don’t know what performer to listen to, just follow me on Twitter and talk to me, and I'll tell you who to start with.”
Contact Reb on Twitter/X here.
Who is Reb’s favorite performer of Bach? Murray Perahia.
ICYMI: See the full article and interview here→
How to Taste Bonus
Peasant to luxury food pipeline
Onions and cabbage—the world’s most humble ingredients. And yet, French onion soup, kimchi, and sauerkraut have become some of our hippest and most beloved foods.
My interviewee for How to Taste, Adam Wong (aka @cookingwong), is a space technologist and food entrepreneur. In this previously unpublished clip, Adam explains how peasant foods become luxury foods, and makes predictions on the next big thing.
ICYMI: See the full article and interview here→
How to Feel Bonus
Exercises for going deeper
How can you get more in touch with touch? Where do you begin? Bex Nagy (aka @embryosophy), a yoga and somatic movement educator, explains how to begin.
LEVEL 1: Feel Yourself
Lie down: Move away from screens or sources of stimulation. Start feeling where your body has physical contact with the floor. Feel your back against the earth, feel the soles of your feet on the ground.
“What is it like when you can let yourself be supported by gravity?”
Roll around: Using some kind of a ball—tennis ball, Pilates ball, even a dog toy with the little nubby spikes on it. Roll it on your body.
Notice how the sensation changes: As you roll one arm, it might start to feel awake and alive. How does that feel different from the other arm? Bex says, “For me, the other one feels asleep or not as grockable, I can't feel it as well, it's not as coherent.”
Make your body the laboratory: Change the speed or the pressure and watch how the sensation changes.
“There's something that happens under the level of awareness through touch that's deeply important and that you don't have to manage, you just feel it.”
LEVEL 2: Be the Bone
Generate a mental model of your forearm: Look at a textbook, anatomy drawing, or a skeleton model of the arm bones. You could also use the chakra or meridian system. “Use these as maps as a way in,” Bex says. “But it’s just an entry point. Try not to get stuck in someone else's visualization.”
Touch your arm: To distinguish between soft tissue and bone, use a firm or direct touch without being forceful. Slowly twist your wrist, feel how the muscles rotate. Feel the slide of the long tissues alongside the forearm bones. Close your eyes. Use your mental map to visualize what’s going on inside your arm as you move.
Change up the pressure: Different qualities of touch will “bring up” different tissues in your mental map. Bex says, “For me, a light tickly touch helps me sense my skin and nervous system. A firmer touch will contact my fascia and bones.”
Tune in to your visual map: Ask yourself, “Where am I?”
Bex describes how she navigates: “I ask myself: What layer of my bone am I in? Am I in the skin of my bone? The periosteum? To me, that feels slidey, slippery. Or am I in the lattice of my bone? Here it feels like I've gone underwater and there's a lot of activity.”
As you tune in via the physical touch, you’ll begin to feel more deeply into your body’s sensation. “Keep experimenting with it,” Bex says. The more you explore, the more you build your physical and mental map of yourself.
Embody your knowledge: Visualizing your bones and tissues, and feeling the sensation of them inside your body, helps you improve your proprioception, your somatic awareness, and even your moods and emotions.
“Most of the book learning I did about anatomy didn't really make sense to me beyond memorizing it—until I really felt it. And then I was like, oh wait, now I can actually embody the knowledge.”
ICYMI: See the full article and interview here→
Coming soon on The Ick season 2!
How to See with Kendric Tonn
How to Smell with Andrés Gómez Emilsson
If you’re new here: Season 1: Embarrassing Stories
Thanks for reading y’all!
-Emily