The Second Amendment was created so that the newborn United States could avoid creating a hateful standing army and instead turn domestic security over to militias. The amendment had little to do with the unhindered gun rights of an individual (lots of gun control existed back in the late 18th century, just as it does now, as every literate person knows). And yet today, a Fox News host brought us full circle, demanding we create a standing army of ex-military people in public places to thwart mass shooters so we won’t have to challenge the imagined right of rageaholics to possess mass murder weapons (or the gun industry’s right to sell them). So we are now using the amendment as an excuse to enact the very thing it was meant to avoid … so we can protect the misinterpretation of those who can’t read the entire sentence.
Posted in Guns, Guns and Other Murder Weapons | Tagged Fox News, Guns, Second Amendment | Leave a Comment »
If you are trying to make sense of two mass shootings in a weekend and you want to see change, I applaud you, but there’s bad news ahead. As we who have been fighting this issue since Sandy Hook know, in the next few days people you know and love and respect are going to start telling you horrible lies about this issue. They are going to tell you 2.5 million people used their guns defensively last year (not true, not even possible). They are going to tell you mass shootings are often stopped by good guys with guns (not true).
They are going to say more Americans own guns now, which is why crime has dropped (household gun ownership has shrunk to a third of Americans, and if you think a shrinking number of Americans are stopping most of the nation’s crime, you have serious math and logic problems).
You are going to hear that armed Americans are the foundation of social stability because they can rise up against tyranny (an idea that, given the strength of our military, ranges from the ridiculous to the treasonous, since it suggests a single nonconformist is allowed to nullify laws and societal changes he doesn’t like).
You are going to hear that assault weapons either don’t exist or that they are the same things as six shooters. Actually, they were defined by law in the 1990s; they have higher muzzle velocity and can be easily converted to full auto with a few tweaks, something gun nuts like to laugh about on YouTube as they gaslight the rest of us and say “No such thing.”) You are going to hear that the Founding Fathers didn’t want gun restrictions. That is categorically false. The people who say otherwise learned history in a backyard from a person with anger management problems, not from actually reading history.
They will also tell you gun control laws don’t work (just because you don’t understand the way they work or don’t like the way they work doesn’t mean they don’t work).
People you love tell these lies for obvious reasons: It helps them defend their choices and behavior. Nobody wants to be told they are doing something harmful, especially if they were raised to think it was right. If they were to change, it would hurt their identity and it would hurt their parents. I have seen some people change on this issue but many people can’t because the psychological wound it would cause is too deep. But this is where we are: We call murder weapons defense weapons even though it is an insult to the concept of physics. Almost every gun fan talking point is a lie rooted in the real defense mechanism–the psychological one.
The NRA fought its war for “gun liberation” (i.e., murder weapon marketing) on the ground–in the state legislatures, places in which most people would be at a loss to name their representatives and where lobbyist bullying is greatly effective. But since Sandy Hook (and especially since the Parkland, Fla., school shooting), there is now a gun sense lobby and it has made representatives increasingly accountable to it–or at least not as totally beholden as they once were to weapons manufacturers.
If you are feeling distraught and feel like you need to do something, you can: march in any anti-gun marches you see planned near you. And give money to Everytown for Gun Safety, Giffords or Sandy Hook Promise. These groups are on the front lines and have thrived despite death threats, disinformation campaigns, online bullying and harassment from the “good guys with guns.” The wheel is turning slowly, but it is turning. I have personally seen stubborn people switch sides on this issue and embrace gun sense, and that has given me a great deal of hope as these horrific news stories unravel. There is no need to think we are going to have to forever endure putting our families–our children, wives, husbands, mothers, sisters, fathers–at risk of sudden horrific death to satisfy a value system based entirely on falsehoods.
Posted in Guns, Guns and Other Murder Weapons, Politics | Tagged Everytown for Gun Safety, Giffords, gun control, gun violence, Sandy Hook Promise | Leave a Comment »
I am alm
ost done recording my latest album, Salon de la Guerre’s Air Is a Public Good, which I hope to release in a month or so. The likely surprise to my fans, such as they are, is that this is my first album totally devoted to country music.
Longtime listeners might know that I’ve trodden these paths before on songs like “Alice Ploughshare,” but this is the first time I’ve devoted an entire album to the genre.
Like a lot of rock fans, I was hostile to country music for a long time. I grew up in Oklahoma, where C&W tunes abounded–most of them wretched. I absorbed some of my father’s affection for the Waylon & Willie album, but that’s as far as it went. The Urban Cowboy soundtrack was catchy when I was 10, but eventually I turned 11.
Then I went to college in Texas, however, and I was quickly informed by knowledgeable people that there was great country music everywhere and that I was an uninformed dodo who had simply missed it listening to bad radio (a rookie mistake for a young arts writer). I was instructed by mentors to seek out the good stuff. I figured out Kelly Willis and Mary Chapin Carpenter and that led me to Lucinda Williams and David Allan Coe. I pulled out Willie and Johnny Cash again. I dutifully listened to the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
But honestly, I still listened to country the way a professor studies 40,000-year-old bone flutes. I appreciated the music–started to see the common sources whence folk, blues and country sprang–but never actually craved hearing it the way I did proto-punk, classic rock, jazz, folk, hip-hop, classical, Tejano, salsa … almost anything else.
Then, dear reader, I say shamefacedly that I finally had my eyes opened the same way most people did in the last 20 years: by the fucking O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Yes, it’s really that prosaic an explanation. I cannot tell you how embarrassed I was to suddenly come out of my coma of snobbery with the help of a popular movie soundtrack, but there it was: the omnipresent music of my youth in a Southern state suddenly made sense. Everything snapped into place. Emmylou Harris. Alison Krauss. Gillian Welch. The Stanley Brothers. I finally heard the brilliance of the close harmonies, the structural brilliance of the chord and key changes in the songwriting (at least the good songwriting). More important, I came to understand the simplicity of the communication in this folk medium–that the horrific twanging I associated with this music was an unnecessary, disposable gimmick and that the subject matter was more fluid and nuanced than I had given it credit for. I went back to Lucinda. I found Neko Case. Hank Williams! I figured out Hank Williams!
Worrying I might get sidetracked into somebody else’s idea of tradition and mythology, I eschewed mentors this time and negotiated my own path through the history, focusing mostly on three acts: the original Carter Family, Gene Clark (in his post-Byrds career) and Gram Parsons (both within and outside his famous bands).
I learned about Maybelle Carter’s revolutionary guitar style, in which the melody is thumbed on the bass notes while the fingers tickle the chords, and Sara Carter’s simple, unadorned call, which seems like non-singing to the uninitiated. When you first hear “I Never Will Marry” by the Carters, you feel like you’re hearing a lot of hoarse people from the ’30s singing into a can. You’re not ready for how much the song resonates over time and grows in poignancy. By the time my son was born, I was singing this to him to put him to sleep. (He’s allowed to marry if he wants to.) On the song “Wabash Cannonball,” you can hear the DNA of countless singers in Sara Carter’s delivery (Lucinda Williams comes to mind again).
From Gram Parsons I learned the simplicity of the music could be preserved while the subject matter grew more mature and even incorporated harder electric instruments without compromising the musical values. The close harmony singing and soul accents of the first Flying Burrito Brothers album are a great blueprint for what this music can be when it’s allowed to grow.
Gene Clark, of course, was the first guy to leave the original Byrds. His solo career was sickeningly neglected as he moved away from folk-rock into country, working both on his own and with banjo great Doug Dillard. He eventually had to exploit the Byrds name again to keep eating (before he died in 1991). But Clark’s song “Polly” from Dillard & Clark’s second album, 1969’s Through the Morning, Through the Night, is one of the most perfect songs you’ve never heard. The first time I heard its harmonies, I thought I’d cracked open the Matryoshka doll containing Linda Ronstadt, Fleetwood Mac (the Lindsey Buckingham version), Walter Egan, the Eagles–all the L.A. studio rock of the next decade. All due respect to Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, but their version of “Polly” is horribly stiff and mannered by comparison. Clark’s delivery is simple and pained without using any tricks and so intimate that you almost feel like you’re invading the guy’s privacy just by listening to it.
What the Hell Has This Got To Do With Salon de la Guerre?
OK, I figured out country is great, but why am I making a country album?
Well, for one thing, I’m always writing music, even when I go on walks, keeping a list of chord changes locked in my head (I often have to get an idea recorded onto my phone recorder before I forget it. You’d laugh your ass off hearing me singing these hundred or so musical ideas onto tape, many of which I can barely understand on second listen). In any case, a lot of these bits I culled from the tape I realized just wouldn’t lend themselves to rock songs.
Second, once I figured out what Maybelle Carter was actually doing and how it informed all country music down to the present day, I asked myself a very simple question: I wonder what it would sound like if I tried her style on a guitar tuned the way Sonic Youth tunes it. Many of their strings are tuned identically, giving the notes more harmonic power and even changing the timbre of their instruments. So I sat down one afternoon and retuned my guitar to line up some of those strings. Later, I put the guitar in open C tuning (you can look that up). The thumb went to work. The fingers tickled out the Sonic Youth harmonics. Bang! Three new songs in a couple of hours.
The third motivation came from my intense curiosity about the banjo: Specifically, could I play one? I had never tried, yet the finger-picking style set down by John Fahey is something I’ve been aping since I first picked up the guitar. I was giddy thinking that I might be able to pick up a banjo immediately and make something. So I bought one. And though I’m no Earl Scruggs, I did get five new songs out of the thing the second time I picked it up.
Lastly, I had a simple question about myself: Did I have country music in my veins all along? This stuff was in my background my entire life. I might have hated it, but I wondered if my body had picked up the reflexes anyway and made this stuff somehow second nature to me. Could I do it without parody? Without twang? Without sounding like the feelings were false? I wanted to know.
In case you’re interested in more technical stuff: I played three of the songs on this album with electric guitar, played one song on acoustic guitar and added banjo to five other songs. The rest of the music was synthesized on GarageBand–all the percussion, bass and piano (I do play the tiny one-hand piano on my tiny phone, though. I’m sure it would look ridiculous to an observer).
So here I add one of the first completed songs from the album, “Mirror, Mirror on the Floor” in the open C tuning. Enjoy.
Posted in Music | Tagged Air Is a Public Good, banjo, country music, Gene Clark, Gram Parsons, Maybelle Carter, Salon De La Guerre, Sonic Youth | Leave a Comment »
I have just released my sixth novel, American Banjo, as an e-book on Amazon.com. I plan to release the novel in paperback version, hopefully later this year, along with all my other novels.
The plot: An heirloom Federal-style banjo clock built in 1804 is passed down through eight generations of a secretive family of ultra-high-net-worth Americans. Built shortly after the American Revolution, it has come to mean something different to all its holders. To Sandra Eccles, one of the family’s daughters, the clock may prove the guilt or innocence of not only a few founding fathers, but also her storied grandfather, who made munitions in World War II. His possession of a painting that might have been stolen from a Jewish family by the Nazis leads Sandra to try to uncover a puzzling skein of relationships and help her determine how good her forebears really were and what they were after.
I piece together the story line from various “diaries” of the characters, a cast from different times and places in American history, whose dreams and aspirations and ethics are different, even though the ways they aspire are somehow the same.
Posted in Fiction, Literature | Tagged art, art theft, astronomy, banjo clock, Civil War, Concord, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, industrialists, Massachusetts, Nazi art theft, painting, replevin, World War II | Leave a Comment »
I’ve always described Game of Thrones as an eight-year object lesson in Stockholm syndrome. Almost every important story arc is about somebody coming to identify with their captors or kidnappers. How many times has somebody fallen in love with or identified with, those who have captured, degraded or beaten them, robbed them of their true selves? How many times have captives taken kidnappers’ values as their own? Theon was a hostage. Sansa was a hostage. Lyanna Stark. Arya. Daenerys. Jamie. Jon. It’s not one plotline. It’s more than half of them.
And after a week of reading unhinged rants by fans angry about this season, I’m starting to think the last hostages were the audience, the people too closely identifying with characters who “suddenly” did indefensible things, when in fact they had always been doing indefensible things. We cheered on revenge; we put our hopes in outcomes that couldn’t possibly be good and people who couldn’t possibly succeed in moral ways. Beheadings. Burnings at the stake. Crucifixions. Daggers in the heart. We were always happy to let these things happen to the right people–and that has always been the meretricious nature of fascism. (Our favorite character Tyrion nicely bright-lined this problem last night in the finale.)
So the show in the end did the absolute right thing: made us see our addiction to wrongness and did it in an accelerating pace the way all good fiction does as it races toward its end–in a frenzy of action that excited and shattered us in equal measure. That is so very difficult to accomplish. I think the show completely lived up to its promise and was right to break our hearts. We live in a world where good people turn evil out of political and religious conviction, as well as from conviction in the movements they join and from the false esteem they place in empty symbols (red hat, anybody?)
Spoiler here: Did Daenerys Targaryen turn evil too fast? She’d been fighting for innocent victims her whole life, right? Well, she’d also been crucifying and burning people, too. And doing so mostly out of conviction in her own destiny. Her empathy had always come in part from being downtrodden herself. And the moment she lost that empathy was the moment she finally seized total power–and knew the potential that the downtrodden of the world will never know. She’d had her closest advisors either die or turn on her and the only political capital she had was the fire and blood she’d always promised. I waited for this scene to feel forced to me, like the writers were coaching me how to feel over my shoulder. I never did. And trust me, I’m a writer of fiction. And a former critic. I know when it’s happening. My anger and sadness came from knowing that this change in a character, who had developed a obdurate existential quality all her own, was totally inevitable.
One of the most heartbreaking things was Tyrion’s insistence to Grey Worm that he still wanted to fulfill his queen’s ideals, even though his queen needed to die to fulfill them. It was a tragic admission that the queen and her ideals could not together be. Virtue and power come into conflict. This show isn’t Shakespeare, but the parallels to Caesar should have been obvious and should have been the context we put this tragedy in.
I was just asked in a chat room about why I singled out Arya Stark as a serial killer when she lives in a world of killers. I was just using the dictionary definition, friend … and you’ve employed moral relativism here why?
I’ve also seen chat room fanatics argue the show owes it to fans, the ones who kept the show alive, to give them more of what they wanted. In other words, they should have been pandered to more. As the great comedian Julie Brown once pointed out in a TV sketch, when fans write the shows, we end up with nothing but women in bikinis playing volleyball.
But my sincere condolences to the Game of Thrones fans who have been let down by their heroes and, especially, their feminist heroines this month. I am shocked and saddened to learn that so many people did not seem to understand what show they were watching for eight years.
Posted in Entertainment, Fiction, Film & TV | Tagged Daenerys Targaryen, Game of Thrones, HBO, Tyrion | Leave a Comment »
There are a lot of Eric Rasmussens in the world, many of whom I’ve recently discovered are tilling the same fields that I am. I’ve seen Eric Rasmussens at work in journalism, law, literary criticism, polemics, music and fiction. That’s bound to create confusion.
Again, my full name is Eric Randolph Rasmussen. I’ve written a companion piece for this post telling you who I am. Out of respect for the other Eric Rasmussens, I felt the need to give you a list of the ones I am not:
Eric Ralph Rasmussen, pro baseball player.
This one seems pretty obvious. This was the only other Eric Rasmussen I’d ever heard of growing up. I never worried people would confuse us. I can barely pitch, catch or bat.
Eric David Rasmussen, physician, medical ethicist, humanitarian
Again, I’m not too worried about you getting us confused. This guy has an interesting career and is worth your attention.
Eric Rasmussen, writer, editor of Barstow & Grand
This Eric Rasmussen is a Wisconsin-based fiction writer and very nice guy who sent me a nice note and has an excellent blog and lots of excellent fiction. I do not wish to steal his thunder.
Why the confusion: We are both literary fiction writers. I do not see any novels on his resume (he mentions an unpublished manuscript), and I have never published any short stories (outside of a few bad experiments on my blog) but there are obvious reasons people are going to confuse us. For that reason, I have made sure to put “Eric Randolph Rasmussen” on most of my fiction, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to see it on my journalism.
Eric Rasmussen, jazz saxophonist, composer, band leader of the Eric Rasmussen Quartet, director of instrumental music at Scottsdale Community College
Alto saxophone player Eric Rasmussen has played with a number of big jazz names (you can find some of his music here), and his musical focus is jazz while mine is alternative rock and punk, but there are several reasons people might get us confused, especially if they knew me back in the day in Oklahoma.
Why the confusion: Several reasons. We have both been New Yorkers, we have both lived all over the country, we are both composers and we both play alto saxophone (though he actually worked at it his entire career while I gave it up for two decades). I have mostly stayed away from jazz on my albums, but Salon de la Guerre fans know that I have experimented with all sorts of genres, and I finally dipped my toe into jazz a few years ago, yanking out my long-dormant alto sax chops for the eight songs on Salon de la Guerre’s album Hot Tears. I also play alto sax on a song called “Red Clay Moses,” which you can hear on YouTube. Jazz sax player Eric Rasmussen deserves his many accolades, but Hot Tears and “Red Clay Moses,” a cross between jazz and Sonic Youth guitar, are all mine.
Eric Dean Rasmussen, associate professor of English literature at the University of Stavanger.
I first followed Eric Dean Rasmussen for a couple of reasons: He was a literature guy and, more important, he was the first of us with the cunning to grab the Ericrasmussen.com domain name. There can be only one, Highlander!
That said, most of his work, as far as I can tell, is literary criticism and theory, subjects I’ve studiously avoided since college. I never worried too much people would confuse us. Besides, he was in Chicago and then later, apparently, Norway.
Why the confusion: Still, we are both lovers of literature, and we both somehow at some point met with (and wrote about) famous superhero literary publisher Barney Rosset, founder of the Grove Press and publisher of Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. Eric Dean met Rosset through his work at a literary organization. I met Rosset at a bar. Though the other Eric was seemingly better prepared for the encounter and knew more about Rosset to begin with, I must give myself some points for not misspelling Rosset’s name. (I have some advantages being a journalist.)
I see that Eric Dean and I also have a very tenuous connection through the website Altx.com. He has articles posted there, and I used to be associated with a literary magazine called Io that had links to the site as well.
Eric Rasmussen, internationally renowned Shakespeare scholar, foundation professor at the University of Nevada at Reno
Again, I wasn’t too worried about being mistaken for a Shakespeare scholar, though we are both authors and we are both on Amazon. He’s even on YouTube!
Eric Rasmussen, actor.
I took an acting class once and I’m enthralled by the subject, but I have mostly left that field to my wife.
Eric Rasmussen, professor of communication.
I don’t see much room for confusion here, though I do have a communications degree (in journalism) from the University of Texas, and it could be somebody somewhere gets us confused.
Eric Rasmussen, Twin Cities broadcast news investigative reporter, KSTP TV
This guy’s been in Boston and Minneapolis. I’ve never been in front of a camera, but we are both journalists.
Eric B. Rasmussen, business professor at Indiana University. This guy is known for tweets deemed by many to be sexist and racist, and the university itself has called his online sentiments “vile.” I won’t link to him, and I am only including him here because I want to make sure people never confuse me with this person.
I will leave it at that. I recall seeing other people with my name also pursuing music journalism (an old part-time vocation of mine) and statistics and hockey, but I’m not too worried about being confused with those people. I’ll add names to this list later if I think anybody is going to mix me up with someone else.
Posted in Comedy, Fiction, Music, Poetry, Salon De La Guerre, The Retributioners, Web series | Tagged alto saxophone, Clam Fake, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, Fiction, jazz, Letters To My Imaginary Friend Leticia, Music, Novels, Red Clay Moses, Salon De La Guerre, The Retributioners | Leave a Comment »
It was difficult growing up with the name “Eric Rasmussen” for a few obvious reasons. It’s a funny name for children to say, and given children’s talent for innovation, a fun name to mock. (“Raisin Muffin” was the sobriquet the junior high kids finally settled on for me.)
My name is now a problem for a different reason: It’s not anywhere near as as rare as many people think it is. “Rasmussen” is kind of like the Scandinavian “Smith.” and “Eric” is a natural fit for it. So not only are there tons of Eric Rasmussens in New York City (I even bumped into one at a party), but tons of them working in the same fields I work in–fiction, music, film and journalism. After I began recently releasing a slate of my novels, I realized there’s another Eric Rasmussen who writes short stories. He, like me, is published in several places.
I’m a hyphenate, which makes things more confusing. I’ve been working in at least four different media for years, subjects I’ve been passionate about since my teens. I never saw a reason not to pursue all of them at once, and I dare say I’m good at some of them. But to the outside world (and definitely to a career coach) it probably looks like I have multiple personality disorder.
So now I realize it’s become necessary to tell people both who I am and who I’m not. I talk about the latter in this companion piece. But for now, I’m going to give you my CV, if for some reason you get confused about which Eric Rasmussen you’re dealing with. My name is Eric R. Rasmussen. I grew up in Oklahoma, went to college in Austin, Texas, and have lived in New York City for three decades. I have a fairly large amount of content on the internet in multiple media.
Journalism
I’ve been a journalist since my college days. I focused first on arts and entertainment; in 1997, I started writing about finance. The following are the publications I’ve written for (if you see my name pop up in a different newspaper or magazine, it is not I):
The Daily Texan (the University of Texas student newspaper)
The Austin Chronicle
The Alcalde (The University of Texas alumni magazine)
Io magazine
Swing magazine
Civil Engineering
Investment Management Weekly
Financial-Planning.com
Nurseweek
Financial Advisor magazine
Film
I ventured into filmmaking in 2006 with a series of shorts I made at New York University. I later created a web series with my wife from 2007 to 2009 and I’ve also written a few screenplays that I’ve entered into competitions. These are my works:
S&M Queen For A Day (2006)
Scrabble Rousers (2006)
The Retributioners (web TV series, 2007-2009)
Candy Rocks Doesn’t Grow Up (a screenplay and semi-finalist for the Austin Film Festival comedy screenplay competition in 2012)
“Lanternfly” (2021). This is a music video I made for the song of the same name off the Salon de la Guerre album Wings Made of Cash.
Music
I am the sole musical artist behind Salon de la Guerre, which released its 48th album in 2026. I worked on music through the 1990s, but didn’t start releasing definitive versions of my songs until 2007 on MySpace and didn’t start putting them out in album formats until 2012. As of May 2026,* I have released 623 songs (some of these are reprises within my classical albums, but I count only 12 or so of those).
I’m listing the albums here with the dates I published them on the streaming sites (these are not the copyright dates of the songs, some of which were written as long ago as 1993). My albums are:
Time-Traveling Humanist Mangled by Space Turbine (2012)
Four-Track Demons (2014)
Diasporous (2014)
The Mechanical Bean (2014)
Toe-Tapping Songs of Pain and Loss (2014)
Your Eyes Have Mystic Beams (2014)
Clam Fake (2016)
Roses Don’t Push the Car Home (2016)
Gravitas: A Life (2016)
Liberty (2016)
The Church of Low Expectations (2016)
In the Lake of Feral Mermaids (2017)
The Widowhood of Bunny (2017)
Keep Your Slut Lamp Burning (2017)
Driver, Take This Cab to the Depths of the Soul (2017)
All Else Dross (2017)
Yipano (2018)
You’re Going To Regret What You Did (2018)
Bleed (2019)
Air Is a Public Good (2019)
From Sour To Cinnamon (2019)
Infinity Boy (2019)
Golem Vs. Duende (2020)
Hot Tears (2020)
Bring An Open Mind To A Broken Heart (2021)
Hugs for Mountains (2021)
Digital Moon (2021)
The Black Sheep Symphony (2021)
Cold For Mars (2021)
The Dog Opus (2021)
Wings Made of Cash (2021)
Stereoisomer (2022)
Even Toy Dogs Get the Blues (2023)
Uncle Ernie’s Progress (2024)
Citizen Wet Smack (2024)
No One Hears a Zen Busker (2024)
The Tug Fork War (2024)
How Do You Bleep? (2024)
Standing Close To Power and Catching Its Cold (2024)
Faint Heart (2024)
Resting Horse Face (2025)
Rump Heart (2025)
Betrayed (2025)
The Family From Kongsberg (2025)
The Green, Green Gas of Home (2025)
Everything’s Fine (2025)
Carnival (2025)
Fire Regime (2026)
Fiction
I’ve been writing fiction for well over two decades; however, for many reasons, most of them banal, my novels sat unpublished on my computer for years. In 2019, that all changed: I began releasing my novels as e-books on Amazon, with the hopes of releasing the paperback versions on the platform later on. As of August 2025, all ten of my novels are now available on the site. The books are mostly comic, though they also stretch into historical fiction and absurdism.
Here’s the complete list (I’ve listed the dates I released them on Amazon, though many of these books were finished in the early 2010s):
Zip Monkey (2019)
Detective J (2019)
Letters to My Imaginary Friend Leticia (2019)
Traffic Waitress (2019)
Did it End? (2019)
American Banjo (2019)
The Ghost and the Hemispheres, Vol. 1 (2020)
The Ghost and the Hemispheres, Vol. 2 (2020)
The Ghost and the Hemispheres, Vol. 3 (2020)
The Silly Dreams of Shallow Sleep (2025)
Poetry
My big plan as a teenager was to be a poet, and though I gave up on it for several years, I’ve got a few dozen poems to my name now, and I’m considering putting out a collection in book form at some point. The vast majority of my poems were never published except for here on this blog you are reading. However, I did get a few bits into the college literary magazine back in the day:
Analecta 1989-1991 (the University of Texas literary and arts journal)
The Blogosphere
Beauty is Imperfection is the blog you are reading right now. I started posting these little musings on MySpace in late 2006 and switched over to WordPress in 2009, moving a lot of the MySpace content over after seeing that the latter platform was dying.
As my long-suffering readers know, even in my blogging life, I’m something of a schizophrenic. For its first few years, Beauty Is Imperfection was a comedy blog with lots of Top 10 lists and other silliness, most of which was meant to help create buzz about my web series, The Retributioners. In 2010, my mother died, and the blog took on a more somber tone, and I also started posting a lot of political material to give the world a taste of my long-stifled polemical voice. My posts have been infrequent in the last few years; occasionally I post new poetry, but otherwise I use the blog to let people know about all these many other projects I’m working on.
Hopefully, this post gives you a more complete picture of me. I rarely talk about these projects with friends and colleagues, mostly because I’m not the bragging sort, I don’t like to shove art down people’s throats and I know how much great, perhaps better art is out there that I’m competing with. I’m offering this summary of my career mostly to help people navigating the internet avoid confusion if they see a name like mine and don’t know whom they are dealing with.
For the record, I haven’t written any plays.
*Updated June 18, 2026
Posted in Books & Literature, Business and the Economy, Comedy, Entertainment, Fiction, Film & TV, Letters to Leticia, Literature, Music, Poetry, Salon De La Guerre, Self Absorbed Ramblings, The Internet, The Retributioners, The Web, Web series | Tagged blog, Eric Randolph Rasmussen, Fiction, Film, Letters To My Imaginary Friend Leticia, Novels, Salon De La Guerre, The Retributioners, Traffic Waitress, Zip Monkey | Leave a Comment »
I have just published a new novel, Did It End? now available on Amazon.com.
A happily married couple find their lives turned upside down by the husband’s first taste of literary success. Is it still possible for two people who have grown so well together to keep doing so now that their priorities, goals, dreams and desires have so utterly changed? And who does the dishes now?
Bob Henderson is a creative writing teacher who fusses over words too much while trying to push out depressing novels. His down-to-earth wife pushes him to write crass commercial screenplays instead. One of them, a frat douche comedy, surprisingly sells.
The couple is uprooted from New York and land in L.A. where all hell starts to break loose. After years of playing by the rules of good behavior, they both suddenly start acting out in surprising and horrible ways.
It’s a book about sudden money syndrome, the danger of finding your dreams fulfilled, and the real possibility of losing your enlightenment after spending so long trying to gain it.
The book has comic elements but like my last outing, Traffic Waitress, it’s a bit more serious and a bit more into examining human behavior.
The book is now currently available only as an e-book. I plan on publishing this and all my other books in paperback form through Amazon’s publishing platform later this year.*
This is the fifth book I’ve published this year, and I’ve got two more coming (actually four, since I’ve split one of them into a trilogy). Did I really write nine books this year? No. I started all these books many years ago and spent years tweaking them as I played footsie with various agents. They all seemed to develop together and I’m perversely inclined to drop all of them on the world at once. Sorry about that! But if you’re so inclined, please enjoy!
(*Update: As of February 2020, I have still not finished uploading all my novels in e-book form, and I have had to push back my plans to publish them in paperback. While this is still my plan, I’m going to keep that deadline open-ended.)
Posted in fashion, Literature | Tagged 12-step, couples, Did It End?, family drama, Fiction, interventions, Novels, screenwriting, Sudden money syndrome | Leave a Comment »
Salon de la Guerre has just released its 19th album, Bleed. It’s a collection of punky, poppy and occasionally soulful songs that sometimes drifts into country-ish singing and which features at least one of my out-of-control guitar solos.
The album is now available on Amazon, iTunes, CD Baby and Spotify, among many other music streaming services in the U.S. and abroad.
I can’t speak for comparisons, but my friends say the album reminds them of Mark Lemhouse, the Pixies and/or Black Francis, Sugar and/or Bob Mould and Matthew Sweet. If you’d asked me, I would have said that I’d had the Rolling Stones, Roxy Music, X and (yes) the Pixies in mind, but only because I always have these groups in mind when I’m doing anything. I have two songs where the harmony vocals are probably the major attraction and I think I sound a little like Seals & Crofts. Not something I would have planned. At some point, your inspiration and direction must compromise with the reality of your voice and what it does well. I often wish I had a Sonic Youth voice, but I don’t really.
I wrote, performed and produced the album and I’m responsible for all the sounds and solos, some of which are on actual guitar, some of which make use of Apple’s wonderful Garage Band software for the iPhone.
Here is a sample of one of the new songs, with lyrics:
“Praise Javelin” by Salon de la Guerre
Music and Lyrics By Eric Rasmussen
Copyright 2019
Now the time has come to praise javelin
Civil war is now your brand
Biblical violence and the handshake of a salesman
A peaceful finger turn to warful hand
Sky worshipper protecting the land
Easy to use; easy to understand;
You see crosses and cross the land
You turned to homicidal ideation
When the masses came and turned on your man
You speak cant and speak the tongues of babble land
Fashion words into a fisted hand
Sky worshipper protecting the land
Easy to use; easy to understand
Biblical violence is now your brand
Where pretty baby did you get that complex?
Was it the woody finish of a vintage wrath?
Praise the father and his heart full of GORE-TEX
Praise the mother made of wire and cans
Sky worshipper protecting the land
Easy to use; easy to understand;
You see crosses and cross the land
There’s a scrap of the prophecy in my hand
No longer tied to the ideals of my homeland
There’s a scrap of the prophecy in my hand
And in my dreams, I inherit nothing but sand
Posted in Music, Salon De La Guerre | Tagged Alternative rock, Bleed, pop, Praise Javelin, punk, rock, Salon De La Guerre | Leave a Comment »
What early characters were written out of George R.R. Martin’s finished drafts of A Song of Ice and Fire, the books behind HBO’s Game of Thrones?
–*Ser Talwyn, the Regifter
–*Queen Birgit the Apostate
–*Ser Warren the Insipid
–*Ser Mountain, Son of Molehill
–*The Pastry Knight
–*Ser Mantos the Sterile
–*Ser Dentos, the Impacted
–*Ser Eryl the Unweaned
–*Braven the Frotteurist
–*Magon the Unimpressive
–*Ser Fallos the Medium Talent
–*Ser Siddy the Umbrage-Taker
–*Ser Ballis the Huggy
–*Pollox, the Smart if Poor of Judgment
–*Tolyn Fuckjoy
–*Mirris Prepucepincher
–*Flavius Scroatworthy
–*Cousin Oliver
–*Fedon the Wood Respecter
–*Ser Color Swatch
–*Eleanor of Screwtown
–*Talys the Unbrassiered
–*Koros the Unclasper
–*Wondish the Pre-diabetic
–*Faleish of the Husks
–*Mellish of the Duck Lands
–*Dropcup
–*Fallmud
–*Burnface
–*Feliox the Hyperactive
–*Matten the Attention Deficit Disordered
–*Mentos, the Freshmaker
Posted in Entertainment, Satire | Tagged Game of Thrones, George RR Martin, HBO, King, knight, Ned Stark, Queen, ser, Song of Ice and Fire, Winterfell | Leave a Comment »
