Back in the dawn of the web, a scrappy bunch of iconoclasts (and I) put together a hyper web text media zine art thing we called Enterzone.
This loosely knit hyperlinked episodic publication contained creative and reportorial content, experimental and traditional works, art and reviews. Some of the founders shared an interest in loose-limbed improvisational music and we prevailed upon one of our friends, Nicholas Meriwether, who even then exhibited a preternatural affinity for deep scholarly inquiry into the counter-culture (as he likes to style it*) and related phenomena.
Also, the Dead, man…!
Because, yes, Nicholas is today the curator of the Grateful Dead archive at UC Santa Cruz, a role he may have been put on this earth to play (among others – Nicholas is a stunningly talented person in many ways).
Anyway, back then we leaned on Meriwether heavily to fill in the gaps on early and recent Bay Area counterculture (that’s how I spell it) happenings and also perhaps because he was still under the thumb of a (friendly) dissertation adviser, he preferred to make some of his contributions to our ‘zine under a semi-acrosticlike pseudonym, Griffin Nicholson and I must say that some of the best original work we published in Eneterzone was by this Griffin fellow.
So, anyway, at the dawn of So Many Roads, a scholarly Dead conference that Meriwether is curating at San Jose State University this fall, it seems appropriate to formally acknowledge that Nicholas is Griffin and that Meriwether is the author of all of the wonderful pieces archived on his author page at Enterzone.
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* UPDATE: Meriwether writes “I no longer spell ‘counter-culture’ with the hyphen… that was a legacy of my time at Cambridge (where I was nominally registered at the time)[.]”