Disco Squaredance.

Wow. And who would have guessed a group of people as crass and rugged as the american pioneers would ever have such an ornate and elaborate system of dance?



I've been sooooo busy with the student teaching. You can check my other blog on that topic:
http://lifeontheothersideofthedesk.blogspot.com/

eee pc!

this is my first blog from my brand new 2g asus eee pc. really hard to get use to, so far. the keys are so tiny... but the thing is just so darned cute!
I have the green one. Next month, i'm planning on picking up a good sized SDHC card for the unit. This might be a great chance to pick up and try a couple little linux sound programs.
Speaking of which, this is my first time using linux, and I think I love it.
Not much time for music lately- student teaching and work combined are rapidly approaching 70 hours a week.

Student Teaching "experience" begins THIS WEEK!

I just got a letter today from my department that I should have gotten weeks ago thats telling me to contact my teacher and principal "immediately" to begin volunteer experience on the 3rd. Somehow I'm supposed to have them type up a letter giving me permission to show up and "volunteer" and build up some sick days. All this is, of course, not going to happen in the two days I have between now and the 14th.
Awesome, thanks again MTSU.
I thought I was an exception because of that call I got a couple weeks back saying "oh HAI, u kno u needz 8 class to graduate, RAIT?" (turns out none of the substitutions that I've filed a bajillion times have even been processed)
Have I explained this here before, because I forget. I've gone through this so many times now I can't even keep track of what the latest fiasco is with them. It's not that the individuals I'm dealing with are inept- most of them aren't. What I'm dealing with "institutional incompetence." That's the business management class way of saying that the whole place should be bulldozed, the rubble burnt and plowed under, and something more useful built in its place. Something like, say, and applebee's, a chili's, and a wal-mart. Then the 10 acres of swampland we now know as MTSU would completely blend in with the rest of Murfreesboro.
When I think about MTSU, this unknown singer's version of Helter Skelter is describing exactly how I feel, but with too much feeling to describe how I feel about it:
Helter Skelter

I am so, so, so sick of MTSU. I am not walking the line, I am snatching the diploma out of record's hand as soon as I see it, making a copy, and putting the original in a fireproof safe. I'm out of energy to hate the place, and I'm over this. Just give me my diploma, and leave me alone. I want to forget that south Nashville ever happened to me. I wish I could just hibernate now and wake up when all this is over.

Oh yes, and this last week we got the scare of our lives when something in the attack starting loudly chewing down through the ceiling into our living room. Pest guy says it was a squirrel. Hope so!

Whole Foods- Misery.

I love food, if you know me, you know that. I always thought I was a food snob, or a foodie or whatever- and then I met some of those people. They have the same kind of attitude that guitar snobs and audiophiles have. It's the same thread of OCD-like behavior that I find in the people I play games with who have 2 8800GTXs in SLI, or the musicians I know who take out enormous loans because an "average guitar is just going to produce average results."
Still, I was really excited when I heard Nashville was finally going to get a Whole Foods. I'd never even been to a Whole Foods before, but I heard they were really nice and had a great selection. So I was really bummed when I got to the nice new Whole Foods and found it a)extremely overpriced and b)full of jerks.
Nashvillians, like most of the Southeast, just don't "get it." I thought when I went to Whole Foods, I would find other people buying, I dunno, Whole Foods? Instead, they've made it just like every grocery store in town, but more expensive. The parking lot is full of luxury cars (I spotted a Rolls Royce and a Ferrari Maranello, among others) that are apparently owned by the same losers who walk through the grocery store buying Totinos pizzas and Bud Light while wearing a thousand dollar suit.
The hypocrisy of obsessing about how your coffee farmer was treated, and then cutting me in line and being a jerk to the workers at the store is so extreme that I don't know if I can handle going back. At first I thought the help at Whole Foods were unprofessional or rude- then I watched how the jerks that come in treat them, and I realized the poor folks are just callous to the abuse that the wealthy patrons have leveled at them. Making $10 and hour to help some schmuck in a dumb-looking outfit worth more than your yearly wage buy mushrooms that are $30/lb. is supremely insulting.
They've also raised the price considerably on almost every single item that Wild Oats once carried. On the sort of items like Totinos(gag) or Boca Burgers (mostly gag), they run about DOUBLE the cost of their more "conventional" counterparts.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm really disappointed in Nashville for this. I had really hoped that the addition of a nice produce section somewhere in town might expand the things people were eating. Instead, I'm finding that the people shopping there aren't doing it for the quality, they're just doing it because it's yet another obnoxious rich thing to do. They're just paying more for the things they'd buy at Piggly Wiggly as a status symbol, instead of taking advantage of all the nice new greens and fruits available to them. That's only going to lead one way(and this is the same thing thats happened to every Publix in town): reduction of selection. If all the Black Cabbage is rotting on the shelf because I was the only person to buy it, they'll stop stocking it.
That same afternoon, after we were so disgusted by Whole Foods, we went over to the CT Farm Fresh market.(across the street from the crappy TN State Farmers Market) Their produce was limited to whats in season, and the prices on everything were amazing. The place is not extremely pretty(ok its not even sort of pretty) but the help is always so nice. The only people there were the cutest hispanic toddler in the world, and her mother. The toddler kept winking at me and waving the whole time, and the guy behind the register was a really friendly coptic egyptian who chatted with me about pomegranates and where I was from. I bought their last Pomegranate, but he said he'll order some soon for me and the other fanatics that come in and want to buy them by the box.
I get along with the immigrant community of Nashville better than any of the other groups for a number of reasons. Food wise, we both like good food and we expect it for a reasonable price. Otherwise, we both feel like outsiders, and are generally lonely, friendly people.
I won't be back to Whole Foods after the prices and service I got at the CT Farm Fresh.(some things at the CT are seriously about 10% of what they are at the WF) I also won't be calling myself a foodie ever again. Seriously, $30/lb for a fungus? Just use something else.

It's a Sunshine Day

Yes, a Brady Bunch cover. This is one of those songs that I know so well I can cover it almost completely from memory. We used to crack up at Bobby's "dig the sunshine line" when I was a kid.
Got the idea when i was plunking around with a synth trying to get a good out of tune organ sound and I accidentally hit the main riff of the song. You know a song is complex when you can play it accidentally. The only song less complex is "I'm a Believer."
deltalsleep- it's a sunshine day

Thanks + Bhangra Mix

I just wanted to send a great big thanks out to the community here for supporting my record, Sound that Can Kill or Cure.
I released on CDR, and I can't recommend that format enough. I only sold 19 copies of my record- some of that was probably BECAUSE I was using CDR, but I doubt that it was enough that I wouldn't have been royally screwed by a CD duplicator. I also sold one download for $6.
My CD is $12, and so far it looks like about $3 of that is going to postage, ink, and blank media. Not a bad shake for something I was gonna do anyways. Shipping through the USPS is so cheap on something like a CD that I just built that into the cost of the CD, and I've not been burnt on that yet.
The vast majority of my sales went to people I already knew, and most of them occurred within a week of my "releasing" the record.
I know a lot of you are contemplating releases all the time, so I thought this data might be interesting to you. I always wondered how many records you sold when you bought ads on em411 and/or tried out labels and things.
The record/download is still for sale, and occasionally one will just trickle in, which is a good way to make my day!
At the top of the post, in the DivShare player today is a 30minute mix of Bhangra I made, because I've promised a friend I would do so for about 3 years now.

Best Buck Rogers Scene of All Time

I used to love this horrible show, and I watched a ton of reruns of it on the sci-fi channel before school as a kid. Now that I go back, I realize that I should have been watching the far superior Space: 1999.
Stu Phillips did the soundtrack to this, by the way.

I've been laying pretty low for a couple weeks now, fighting off some kind of bug and wrapping up my final semester of classes- teaching a lot of social studies and a little reading.

Portland Trip

So, I spent last week in Portland Oregon. We read up on the place a lot before we went, and it really sounded like somewhere we would enjoy relocating to. When you work in public service jobs, you realize really quickly that no matter how cool your city may be, a well run, well paying state is a lot more important. So the possibility of the "if I had to live anywhere else in this state I would move" situation had to be tossed out. There are a lot of surprising and interesting cities in miserable, disorganized, under funded states. Louisville, Austin, Kansas City.
Portland is a lot different. For one, teacher salary in Oregon vs. Tennessee puts me in a position to make a LOT more and retire a LOT earlier. They start out the same, and then after a few years Oregon pulls ahead, with the gap between them as high as $20K at times!
My Review of Portland(What I did on my fall vacation):
Food:
Everywhere we ate except for one place was amazing. I'll spare that place the embarrassment because I'm confident they're doomed anyways. We ate at Esan Thai, and it was the best Thai I've ever had. I had a pumpkin curry that was so hot the steam from it burnt my eyes. I didn't intend for it to be that hot- tolerance for overall food heat seems a lot higher out there. Tons of great pizza, tons of great everything available. People in Portland clearly have very high standards for food and ingredient quality.
But the stunner: had coffee at 5-6 places and it was ALL terrible! The only places serving anything passable were just slinging stuff like Seattle's Best or Tully's. Most of the locally roasted stuff was unbearable.
Oh yeah, and Bubble Tea is amazing. Amazing.
Art:
The majority of the interesting visuals in Portland came in the form of the beautiful downtown buildings. Everywhere it was possible to cram in a local artist's work, it was done. The city looks like a really good place to be as an artist or a musician. I didn't really see anything in particular in the way of visual art that amazed me, but I was very impressed at the good taste in design I saw in most houses and businesses. There's a real emphasis on green spaces within the city, and it's a wonderful thing.
Parks were tucked into every nook and cranny around town. Looking at a map, it would appear that about 40% of Portland's geographic area is public land.
Real Estate:
We think we can hack it money-wise in the city. But I'm not sure how much "hacking it" I want to do. Real Estate is not nearly as expensive as it is elsewhere on the West Coast, and most of the properties we saw were priced fairly. We could get a craftsman/bungalow in a neighborhood we like for about $239K right now. But the sub-prime meltdown has hit that market hard, and I think we'll rent for the first year or two and let it blow over. The market looks like it's going to be flooded with foreclosures soon- TONS of empty condo high-rises downtown asking ridiculous prices.
Gas: about 35-50 cents higher/gallon.
People: way nicer than expected. So nice that they all get in conversations with each other on the trains. People were really surprising, and broke so many of the stereotypes and expectations we had for them. We saw old people that listened to techno and had tattoos. We met an old guy who retired to Portland after holding cue cards for 30 years. He knew Vincent Price . The barriers that exist between people in the Southeast just don't exist as much in Portland. But it would appear that their immigrant communities are a lot more marginalized than ours. As a community, the city of Portland needs to ask itself what it's doing to drive immigrants into all moving to certain neighborhoods.
I met up with 6-7 musicians that I knew in town at a nice little restaurant. We all wore the same glasses, and couldn't figure out why. They were all extremely nice people, and I hope if we move we can stay in touch.

We are hoping that because of Portland's great mass transit system, we can sell one of our cars. All the transit is bike friendly and really safe compared to a lot of cities. So one of our goals is to live in a location convenient to a light rail line that I can take my bike on.

We had such a good time, and were so surprised and overwhelmed by the city that it's taken us a good while to figure out what we thought about the place. It's hard to resist a place thats 90 minutes from the Pacific, and noted for it's liberal government, good food, and tolerance of diverse groups of people. I'm just not going to find good pay in a Red state, and no matter how silly I thought a lot of Portland was, at least they'd respect my right to be just as silly. It also seems like a good place to pick up some extra money DJing and playing a show now and then. They even have a couple venues that lend themselves to electronic musicians, something I had never heard of.

Portland this weekend!

We'll be visiting Portland, OR this weekend. I am so excited, I haven't been on a plane since I was 17. Being able to afford a trip makes me feel like this awful nightmare of my "college years" is finally almost over!
We don't have a bunch of stuff on list to do, except see as much of the city as we can from the Tri-Met. And take a lot of pictures probably.
The weather is supposed to be 50-60 and rainy- like it's supposed to be everyday in the pacific northwest...
I've used google maps to plot our trips around town, because it interfaces well with the Tri-Met website. I have tagged addresses of a bunch of places that might be interested, and sort of planned a trip around the city by getting tri-met directions. It's a HUGELY handy tool when you are exploring a city you know nothing about- it helped me quickly see the proximity of our hotel to all the stuff we were curious about, thus preventing us from spending all day going from one side of the city to the other just to see a few places because we spent all day riding the tram. Not that I don't look forward to riding the Tram... but not all day.
Their mass transit system looks excellent, we aren't even planning on renting a car.
Hope to meet some friends from em411- Vita at 6-ish on Sunday night. BE THERE!

Disco Godfather

I've just had one of the most confusing cinematic experiences of my life. It came to me in the form of a netflix recommendations. Typically, I am totally amazed at how wrong netflix judges what films I'll like. Three Men and a Baby?! What kind of guy does netflix think I am?
The same goes for users "similar" to me- I've only found one user who is more than about 40% similar to me.

But the description of this one was just too much to resist:
"Tucker Williams (Rudy Ray Moore) is a former cop who spends his nights spinning vinyl at a disco. When his nephew (Julius J. Carry III) starts using angel dust, Williams pulls out his martial-arts skills and stirs things up. He gets help from Noel (Carol Speed), and together the pair goes after big-time dealer Singer Ray (James H. Hawthorne). Unfortunately, Ray and his men are more dangerous than the drugs they're selling."

If anybody knows this it's my household: there are a lot of really, really bad movies out there with great taglines. And in general, the "Blaxploitation" genre is entirely overrated. Like all B genres, it's plagued with intolerably bad audio, lighting, and especially bad pacing.

This movie's audio is occasionally bad, its got a little filler- lots of overly long intro shots and disco scenes, and LOTS of drawn out "PCP freakout" scenes. But somehow, I loved the film. The lead character's got an almost grandfatherly stiffness about his acting. I came away from this film convinced not only that I really liked the character, but that I would probably really like Rudy Ray Moore in real life.
There are a lot of false-PSA cautionary tale sort of b-films. Most of them are relatively transparent- it becomes obvious their intention is foul after about 10 minutes. But this film made some sort of an honest statement that I can't quite figure out. I came away from the film thinking that Rudy Ray Moore really wanted me to stay away from PCP, to "Attack the Wack" if you will. And just like in most people's lives, his statement about this somehow came out wrong, or a little unnecessarily mixed up. Disco Godfather spends the whole film effectively chasing the "demon" of PCP as she shows up in the hallucinations of those he cares for. In the end, it is only through his forced entrance into the PCP realm of hallucinations that he's able to conquer this demon- and in a hallucinatory scene involving a burst of bad animation he kills the leader of the PCP lab.
You'll leave the film really confused about what the film was really trying to say.
Also interesting is that I'm starting to notice that films called "blaxploitation" were rated much more gently than those designed for both black and white audiences- this one is a wild drug use movie full of foul language and it got rated the same thing as Home Alone. I can only assume that this was racism on behalf of the MPAA in feeling that black audiences were not as sensitive as white audiences.
This is definitely one that needs a little "parental guidance"- unless you want you children to think that the only way to get a friend off of drugs is to take the drug themselves so they can enter the realm and do battle with the spirit of the drug. On second thought, I think even kids can see that that doesn't really make a lot of sense.

End of Summer Mix

Just playing around with some new software I got, and I thought I'd mix and post a bunch of the new music I've been digesting lately.

Another Year,

Started school this week at MTSU. It's my final semester of university classes before I commit the financial martyrdom that is "student teaching."
This campus is an absolute disaster, and it's gotten markedly worse each semester I attend. Tuition goes up, quality goes down, even the basics are screwed up. Parking becomes more difficult, and I'm starting to see regular road rage outburst behavior in the parking lots. This university is an absolute nightmare- don't go here, if you value your education, or you feel like being treated like a human being.
My schedule is horrible, I have a huge break in the middle of it. That means I'm here all day just for 2 classes.
The big bummer is not having ANY time for music now. I've become conditioned to working in privacy for hours on end, and thats a little difficult to work out with somebody else in the house who is completely annoyed by the sound of my working on music. I'm guessing I now probably have about 4 hrs a week in the early morning or late night to work with headphones on.
This is horrible, I have no idea what I'm going to do to make time alone to work on music. No idea.

Sound that Can Kill or Cure.

So today I go to my miserable school(MTSU)'s Financial Aid department and find out that I no longer qualify for any financial aid. Great! My reward for making $5K more this year was receiving $5K less in federal education grants. Let me tell you how encouraging that is.
So now I get to finish school with even more debt than I thought I would. So, I've gotta hustle to come up with some extra money to help me with books, tuition, living, etc. this semester. I figured now was as good a time as any to wrap up my record and sell it.
I decided not to get "pro" reproductions done, because literally every single person I know who has done that has been thoroughly burnt by the process and left with 200 copies of their own record under their bed.
So what you'll get is a CDR with a nicely home-printed cover.
14 Tracks, 51:01 long.
I'm selling for $12 shipped to anywhere in the world- right now. If the orders start killing me with shipping to Fiji or something I might have to add something for international buyers.
BUY IT NOW! (click that button to paypal me) Make sure to include your full address(including country) and email in the forms.

Yours Truly, 2095

This record has always been a favorite, and this song in particular.
I'm still doing a lot of cover material, because I'm still having lots of trouble writing material and no trouble producing...doing covers is just a fun way to keep making music.
deltasleep- Yours Truly, 2095.

Spotnicks!

I just bumped into a really entertaining swedish surf group called the "Spotnicks." Apparently some portion or another of this group is still going, and as they say, "big in japan."

New Methods of Revenue Generation for the Record Industry.

When the original Napster lawsuits began happening over filesharing, they seemed like a publicity stunt, or at least they felt sort of temporary. Maybe it was the novelty of it, but it felt like the internet died a little bit when that mentality began to creep into the next 5+ years.
As a child, I grew up with the internet. As such, the internet feels like something we helped create to a lot of people my age. I painstakingly dug through manuals and documentation to assemble, install, and fix the early computers of my house when computers were a much more annoying and complex ordeal. (Younger users can't imagine having to assign their own IRQ or DMA channel to hardware) The internet was a new domain for the transmission of information, it was like an enormous library of information. It helped peel back the layers of whitewashing from the history of popular culture. Popular, commercial culture in America thrives on the relentless fad machine. The possibility of now digging through unseen commercials, out of print records, and media that was later censored and removed from the public eye has helped a very large portion of internet users like myself come to a better understanding of recent history.
So when the potential of the internet gets damaged a little bit like it has by the RIAA, I feel very strong, personal feelings about it. That ever vigilant hand of corporate media, angry at the loss of their king maker status and their new inability to control the fad machine, has been in constant pursuit of the destruction of everything that makes the internet great. The great shift in money making methods for the record industry in this decade has not been from the sales of CDs to the sales of MP3, as it should have been, but in the shift from the sales of anything to the wholesale creation of profit generating lawsuits. And the worst part is, the US Government is on their side!
The real problem seems to be that the codgers in Congress and the Senate have NO idea what they are even fighting for. Observe the following, now legendary quote by Ted Stevens of AK on the topic of Net Neutrality.

The definition should be imminently clear to any literate person who read the net neutrality link above. And yet, it's not clear to the Senate. Because they didn't read up on it.
Because they don't understand why the internet is important.

Also, notice how I had to include only a video with the audio of Ted Steven's brilliant speech? Thats because I couldn't post the actual C-SPAN footage of his speech, as C-SPAN has copyright protected all video of senate and congressional hearings and sent nasty-grams to Youtube to remove these videos.

Copyright law is so unprepared for the internet, and it will be 50 years before we have enough senators or congressmen young enough to do anything about it!

Only just this week SoundExchange, a royalty tracker of (in my opinion) dubious non-profit status, threatened to begin charging royalty payments to internet radio stations. The originally proposed scheme meant the end of internet radio, a friend of mine who DJs at an internet radio station cited his bill at "somewhere near $50,000" or, about 50 times his annual budget.
I once had the unique displeasure of having an ASCAP executive come and speak to my "Math for Liberal Arts" class at MTSU. He completely hijacked the discussion into a discussion about how "wrong" filesharing was. (and it was a badly cliched discussion- even once resorting to the "loaf of bread" talking points) He also discussed the recent creation of a process of listening to audio on radio and calculating royalties- and how the early tests of it showed so many royalties owed that ASCAP and BMI would be out of business if they actually paid them. But when I pushed him further, he admitted that most large volume musicians have to file suit to collect the royalties they were promised.

So, I'll be giving my record away and trying to work out a live show to make a few bucks with. When you play some sort of psychedelic electronic country niche, you should just take your listeners where you can get them.

I Hate What Politicians Have to Say About Education

My stomach churns as I think about entering a semester as an education major during which a presidential election takes place. The level of ignorance and outright disdain that a lot of politicians and politicos show towards the education system is embarrassing.
All they have is solutions. Every single politicians knows exactly how to fix education. The Republicans want to reward "performance" with higher pay for teachers.


The Democrats want to continue to throw grants and funds at a system they and everyone else know is broken:


It's extremely easy to debate any of these candidates on education. They all ignore the elephant in the room: culture.
It's just not easy to say to a group of voters: your culture is failing your children. Your culture has destroyed the institutions of marriage and family for half of the children in the country. Your culture expects nothing out of children, and rewards them for everything. (every kid on the soccer team is the best kid on the soccer team, and every one of their kicks is wonderful)
There's a reason that immigrant populations from east Asia, south Asia, and Africa do so much better than their native born peers. They're raised in the same neighborhoods as kids who drop out at high rates. They're resisting drugs at a higher rate. Their test scores are notably higher.
They're also typically living in two parent households with parents who have high expectations for their children, and who aren't afraid to check their kids when they screw up.

It's just not a money issue anymore. Yes, there are schools out there that need financial help. Probably all of them. They're run like social security senior citizen's homes. They've got holes in the roofs. Money will fix roofs, but it won't fix attitudes.

I'll throw my idea into the fray as well: Education needs more focus on critical thinking and data evaluation, and less focus on progressively increasing the amounts of junk that gets crammed into standardized tests. Data goes bad, critical thinking does not.
And by more, I mean like an entire class EVERY day for at least an hour.
No skill will benefit children more in an era where anyone can edit the encyclopedia.

Casio Love

I just got a Casio MT-600 and I am in LOVE with the thing. Luckily, it fit the adapter I had lying around from a mostly unused, enormous, Casio CT-640.
It has the same sort of sound as the lower range in the MT series, but it has an ANALOG FILTER! The DCO tones occupy a great sounding transitional space between the MT series of super simple organi-ish tones and the all PCM sample based tones of the CT series that succeeded it.
That means instant classic when combined with an inability to stay in tune, pitchbend, and a really low sample rate, noisy output.
Witness the awesome: MP3
Everything in that mp3 but the drums is completely unmodified MT-600! To get some of the chorus effects I multitracked the same parts with the fine tune knob cranked.
It's not too hot with bass- it doesn't go too low.
I plan to do a mod I found on the interweb that boost the cutoff and resonance limits and brings a control for each out on the front panel. I'm skiddish though, because these are hard to find, and I really like it the way it is. But all these sounds beg for some kind of hands on control.
$2 from a trailer park yardsale.

Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys+ Found Photos

deltasleep- Mama, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys
Also, here are some 8x10's I recently picked up at a thrift store. I haven't modified them in anyway- except my crappy scanner. There's nothing I love more than finding this kind of stuff! They're like sparse poetry or something- they make you generate most of the real interest. Who are these people?
"Invisible Bike" works on the same angle. (not my image, by the way.)

Almond Butter and New Age OCD Parasite Paranoia

I am so boring sometimes. There's a discount food store not far away from me that I'd really started enjoying going to(House of Bargains in Lebanon, TN). We've become spoiled at my house- getting things like Tahini, San Pellegrino, Cashew Butter, Porcini Oil, and high quality pasta sauces for 50 cents a piece.
I often just buy something because it sounds good- whether I'm sure what it is or not. When I get home, I google the product to find some recipes with the ingredient in it.
Today, this incidentally bumped me into a hilarious review of Almond Butter(which incidentally, also clued me in to just how expensive this item really is! )

[click the pictures to enlarge]

Apparently, this paranoia that "non-organic" food contains parasites is widespread. My wife is typically more familiar with these sorts of things, and didn't see this as surprising at all! She claims to have worked with and known several individuals and families who believe this to be true.
Playing on parasite anxiety is certainly far from new- any older American will tell you about the bevy of disgusting de-worming tonics and medicines they were subjected to. Here's the cover of a pamphlet from 1938. It's remarkably similar in tone to much of the material given to those susceptible to "holistic" quackery. The pamphlet was free, presented as science, and entirely an advertisement for products made by this company (Dr. D. Jayne and Son, Inc. whose headquarters in Philly was reputed to have been one of the most flamboyant in the city at its time)

People were umpteen times more likely to have a parasite during this era- and I'll bet it wasn't because of the high tech fertilizer and pesticides used on their crops- or the genetic modifications made to the foods.
The fact is, food paranoia appeals to some deep-seated survival instinct in people. Behaviors related to food safety are base instincts found the same in lower mammals. Taste Aversion being a good example of this: even when you know that you are sick, throwing up a food that you know is completely safe can make you not want to eat that good again for months- or for those who eat until they vomit, never. For most of us, it takes months for the logical part of us to overcome that survival behavior of avoiding Witness the response you are certain to have to this video, which alleges that pork is full of worms:

You know it's probably not true- but it's scary. I am thoroughly convinced that there is no notion, no lie, no belief more attractive than those that fall along the lines of "everything you know is wrong." And by the way, this video is entirely bogus. Calm down.
But so called "organic foods"(organic in scientific terms just means any compound containing carbon) are not subjected to the very measures that hundreds of years of commercial agriculture have developed as a means of making foods safer and easier to cultivate. Ignoring many of these procedures and practices might make your food taste better- repelling pestilence can actually make produce more nutritious. But I think its a long, long shot to say that NOT using pesticides makes food less likely to have pests in it.
Thats just dumb.

Luckily, there's now(finally?) a USDA Organic certification. I cannot imagine the complexity of developing or enforcing such a body of rules. Really, you can just view these as better quality products. If they taste better, eat them. We're lucky enough in the Western World to have people who get paid to check out our food. People who have spent a decade in school studying chemistry so complex it's beyond your wildest New Age fantasies.
I am beginning to really hate the holistic health and new age movements for their preying upon people who are uneducated or mentally ill- but that seems to be the norm for medical quackery in America. Many mental illnesses come with phobias of being poisoned, or of food contamination. Perhaps it's this tendency thats got the moonmaidens of the world pouring peroxides in their peanut butter, and coke on their pork.