Contributors

At age 19, writer-enfant terribleLegs McNeil named a generation of music, coining the term "punk" when he co-founded the now defunct Punk magazine in 1975. McNeil and Gillian McCain have written Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, excerpted in this issue and due out from Grove this month. Also this month, McCain will publish Tilt (the Figures), a collection of prose poems.

Contributing editor Cathy Horyn found her cover subject, Nicolas Cage, to be a courtly and knowledgeable gentleman. "He knows about everything from etymology to model trains; he has a photographic memory and an incredible ear for music. People are surprised at how articulate he is, but they shouldn't be."

Living in Italy for four and a half years left contributing editor Judy Bachrach with an understanding of Tuscany's allure; this month she provides the text for Brigitte Lacombe's photographs of the film industry's love affair with the countryside around Florence.

Contributing editor Richard Merkin is working with Bobby Short on a book tentatively titled I Like the Likes of You: A Bobby Short Family Album.

"John Grisham's conviction that Natural Born Killers spawned copycat murders and Oliver Stone's indignant reply dramatize complex legal and ethical issues," says contributing editor Michael Shnayerson of his article in this issue.

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William Prochnau and his wife, journalist Laura Parker, profile Pat Robertson in this issue. Prochnau's book Once upon a Distant War (Times Books), about the first war correspondents in Vietnam, was excerpted in the November 1995 issue of V.F. Parker, on leave from the Washington bureau of The Detroit News, is a 1996 Alicia Patterson Fellow, writing about the impact of illiteracy on a small southern town.

The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication has honored contributing editor Christopher Hitchens with its 1996 award for "Professional Freedom and Responsibility." "I have written back," Hitchens says, "to ask, May I accept the freedom and decline the responsibility?"

John Brodie is a reporter at Variety and a contributing writer at GQ. His summer cocktail of choice is a Dark and Stormy, composed mainly of Mount Gay rum, ginger beer, and a sprig of mint.

Contributing editor David Kamp admires the understated style of Rolling Stone drummer turned jazz musician Charlie Watts, and says his taste in rock stars has always run to the quiet ones: "George in the Beatles, Entwhistle in the Who, and, latterly, Bonehead in Oasis."

Senior editor Matthew Tyrnauer, who went on the presidential-campaign trail for the May issue of V.F., highlights the premier architects of the late 20th century for this month's portfolio by Josef Astor.