Shane Smith, in the thick of it for VICE (Vice/HBO)

When Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice Media, pitched a television show to MTV in 2010, it seemed unimaginable that the company that came out of Vice magazine could establish itself as a respected informational source about, well, anything (other than how to decorate your heroin stash). And yet the network bit, and The Vice Guide to Everything ran for eight episodes, balancing ridiculous segments against heavier fare.

With its latest television program, VICE, which premieres next Friday, the media company is once again trying its hand at American television. Not just television. HBO. And this time, it’s not trading on its nihilistic reputation. Instead, it’s asking audiences to trust in its international-relations acumen. It wants to be taken seriously. Or at least as seriously as it takes itself.

“This is the grown-up, smarter, more erudite version of Vice,” Eddy Moretti, Vice Media’s executive creative director (and one of the producers of VICE), told Off the Record. In addition to being more earnest than its predecessor, Mr. Moretti said, this show is intensely researched.

Like Vanguard but shorter and with more cursing, VICE features three correspondents whose job it is to “expose the absurdities of the modern condition”: Mr. Smith, Dos & Don’ts book editor Thomas Morton and a former intern named Ryan Duffy.

For the show’s first season, the trio treks deep into dangerous international terrain, with a special focus on the Middle East, India and the North Korea/Thailand/China region. (We hear that if HBO gives them a second season, they’ll cover domestic terrors as well.)

“News from the Edge” is the slogan that HBO has given VICE, which makes one wonder what counts as “news” these days. VICE goes to dangerous locales and puts its correspondents in inhospitable situations, but it is less current-affairs journalism than novelty of access.

Indeed, immersion and danger are the points of the show, facts that the hosts allude to throughout the segments. “The world is changing,” Mr. Smith intones in the credit sequence. “No one knows where it’s going. But we’ll be there.” It’s the ultimate humblebrag.

Bill Maher, the only non-Vice executive producer of the show—the other two are Mr. Smith and another Vice Media co-founder, Suroosh Alvi—is a natural fit to back the program, as his own off-color TV show is to politics what the Vice brand is to traditional reporting. Fareed Zakaria, who is a consultant on VICE, is a much stranger bedfellow. The fact that a CNN host would be involved in Shane Smith’s project suggests the media company is making a prime-time play for legitimacy with VICE.

Mr. Moretti stopped just short of calling VICE a “news” program—but that may be semantic. “I think it’s a documentary show,” said Mr. Moretti. “News, to me, is everything that happened in a day, from the weather to the president visiting Israel to, you know, a cat in a tree.”

It’s a potato/potahto situation: it’s not news in the timely sense, and yet meeting Taliban leaders is newsworthy. And in recent months, the media company has gotten used to finding itself in the news cycle.

With stunts like sending Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea (where “The Worm” became the first American to meet Kim Jong-un) and the accidental leaking of John McAfee’s whereabouts in Guatemala through a photographer’s metadata, Vice Media has become a newsmaker—if not a newsbreaker.

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un in North Korea (Vice/HBO)

Still, VICE is having some trouble finding where it fits on the spectrum. It seems as though the show wants to stay true to its roots, in some ways, but also wants to be taken seriously; a hard line to toe, especially when your program is composed of two rushed 15-minute segments about “showing some of the scariest, weirdest and most absurd customs and practices known to humanity,” as Mr. Smith has referred to it.

That tongue-in-cheek tone is difficult to maintain when dealing with VICE's surprisingly serious subject matter: child bombers of the Taliban; India and Pakistan’s fights with Kashmir; political unrest in the Philippines. Half of each episode is the correspondents telling the audience how “fucked” the people in a particular region are, with interstitial shots of shockingly explicit footage from bombings, shootings and massacres. It’s not exactly “fun TV.”

In fact, several sources questioned whether HBO has gotten what it bargained for with VICE. They suggested that HBO was hesitant to work with the company—president of HBO Entertainment Sue Naegle in particular—but agreed on the condition that the program would deliver a scoop about Mitt Romney’s polygamist family in Mexico during the election cycle. (That particular piece ended up online, but the show proceeded anyway.) Mr. Moretti denied the existence of such a condition.

Others said HBO was expecting more of the old Vice.

“[HBO] actually wanted a hate-Brooklyn, pissing on themselves [show],” said one source close to the situation, who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. “And then they got all this serious shit.”

“HBO was shocked by that,” our tipster continued. “But Vice likes to do really serious stuff now.” Still, the source floated the possibility that the network was actually impressed: “Maybe HBO was shocked in a good way.”

As Mr. Moretti tells it, there was no resistance from the premium channel.

“It was just kind of a meeting of the minds. It was a wonderful process,” he said. “A lot of people can experience a traumatic pitch process, but with HBO, we just felt like these people knew us, understood us. They have a passion for news and documentary.”

To be fair to Vice, it’s not your older brother’s Canadian grime-core magazine anymore. (Hell, it’s barely a magazine anymore.) Vice Media has become a huge digital content creator, especially with Vice.com, which hosts 60-plus video channels. According to a spokesperson, 80 to 90 percent of what Vice Media produces today is online video.

In 2011 alone, Vice Media made $110 million on these video series, from pre-roll ads to YouTube partnerships. The programs range from the silly to the somber.

The stern of Vice’s skateboards-and-boobs ship began to turn in 2007. That was when Mr. Moretti and Mr. Alvi premiered their documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, about an Iraqi heavy-metal band, Acrassicauda. The video struck all the right notes: it had the hardcore, DIY underground music scene that already fit with Vice’s original conception as a punk magazine, but it was also covering a reality about the war-torn country from a unique perspective. When the accolades began pouring in for the documentary, Vice transitioned—overnight, it seemed—from a hipster outfit to an international “news” presence. The HBO show appears to be the natural culmination of this Vice 2.0.

“The secret of Vice was to stick to the core template I created. Stupid in a smart way, smart in a stupid way. Never be serious,” said Gavin McInnes, a founder and former employee of Vice Media, who left the company in 2008 following a very public dispute after Viacom was brought in. (Viacom maintained a partnership with Vice’s online video content from 2007 to 2009, when it was VBS.TV.) “I think they are trying to do serious journalism now.”

In a 2007 interview with Wired, on the occasion of the launch of VBS.TV, Mr. Alvi said, “Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since Day One with the magazine, we never believed in that.”

In fact, when VBS.TV first launched that year, its motto was: “Rescuing you from television’s deathlike grip.”

Oh, the irony.

“I think it’s a maturation of our natural form of documentary storytelling,” Mr. Moretti said of the show. “A maturation of the Vice brand, in a way. It’s consistently more serious, and the stories are told with a lot of diligence.”

When asked if this evolution represented Vice’s bildungsroman, Mr. Moretti answered with a laugh: “Totally. Actually, it’s my personal bildungsroman.”

Like a lot of things about Vice, though, we couldn’t tell if the executive was being totally serious. Which might be a problem when it comes time to teach Americans about the Pakistani and Indian factions currently tearing apart the region of Kashmir.

In the meantime, we’ll take Vice’s new conscientious-citizens-of-the-world shtick with a grain of salt. Or, if they can spare it, a bump of blow.

Additional reporting by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke

Natasha Lyonne, “Bon Qui Qui” and Simon Doonan. (Rooster New York)

We all know that during the days leading up to Fashion Week, designers tend to go, in the words of Anthony Perkins, "a little mad sometimes." Still, it's hard to imagine what sort of monumental pressure Alexander Wang was under when he agreed to contract Rooster New York, a new branding content site run by Vice magazine co-founder Gavin McInnes (who also directed this segment), for his T by Alexander Wang spring 2013 campaign video. Did we mention that it also stars sketch comedienne Anjelah Johnson as Bon Qui Qui, a pretty racist caricature she developed on MADtv, which we would have certainly been bothered by, had we or anyone we knew watched that program?

Also, Simon Doonan and Natasha Lyonne.

Yikes. When you get an idea this perfect, it must be hard to turn it down.

We guess the joke is that, in reality, Bon Qui Qui would be kept in a windowless factory loft, forced to work in inhumane conditions for less than minimum wage. Did we get it?

(Mark Hammermeister)

Two weeks ago, Phil Mushnick, a respected veteran sports writer for The New York Post, published a column about the Brooklyn Nets’ new brand identity, as designed with the help of Jay-Z. The team—previously known as the New Jersey Nets—had switched their colors to black and white. “Why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment?” Mr. Mushnick suggested, referring to the team’s part-owner. “Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N------s. The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B---hes or Hoes ...”

Once upon a time, a remark like that would have led to a call for Mr. Mushnick’s head ... or at least a resignation. And while several media outlets picked up on the story on their Web sites, the “scandal” was a non-starter. Mr. Mushnick was not reprimanded by The Post. Forbes even defended him.

If the story of Mr. Mushnick seemed novel, though, it was only because it didn’t happen on Twitter. At times, it seems as if the microblogging platform was designed to ease the glide path of users’ feet directly into their mouths as they dash off unthinking, offensive commentary: Cee Lo Green calling a fan of The Voice ‘gay’; CNN commentator Roland Martin’s homophobic tweets after the Super Bowl; Chris Brown being Chris Brown (his response to a hater: “Grow up n——a!!! Dick in da ass lil boy.”)

Ashton Kutcher's "brownface" PopChip commercial

Nearly four years after the election of a black man as president, intolerant attitudes are having a cultural moment. And one inspiration may well be Mr. Obama himself, whose occupation of the White House seems to have been misinterpreted as a signal that the country has overcome the ugliness of its racist past and we are now all free (at last) to air our most contemptible prejudices.

Of course, not all racists, sexists, anti-Semites and homophobes are created equal. There’s the bilious misogyny of a Rush Limbaugh and the unhinged anti-Semitism of a John Galliano or a Mel Gibson or a Delmon Young. There’s the mass-stupidity of all of those Hunger Games fans outraged by the casting of an African-American actor as a character they thought was white and the semi-ironic, "hipster racism" displayed by Lesley Arfin, a writer for the HBO show Girls.

The latter form was dubbed “ironic racism” after Ms. Arfin responded on Twitter to criticisms that the show didn’t feature enough women of color, cracking, “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.”

The tweet, quickly deleted, spurred bloggers to uncover other damning evidence of Ms. Arfin’s racist attitudes—including a 2007 interview on the Huffington Post, in which she noted the n-word “was a great word. It packs so much punch.” (To give more context, Ms. Arfin was asked to pick between three 'hate' terms as her favorite.) Gavin McInnes, Ms. Arfin’s former employer at VICE, jumped to her defense—not that he’s an especially respected authority on tolerance.

It seems that with the rigid speak-no-evil precepts of political correctness now as out of fashion as stonewashed jeans, the rules have become a little fuzzy. It’s interesting to see just what sort of parochialism is forgiven and what is not. The hit Comedy Central series Tosh.0 includes a segment called “Is It Racist?” that is itself, arguably, racist (it’s definitely stupid). Meanwhile, ESPN employee Anthony Federico was fired for headlining a story about Jeremy Lin “A Chink in the Armor,” though he later claimed the implication was inadvertent. There was Ashton Kutcher’s controversial “brown face” ad for PopChips and Jon Hamm’s not-that-controversial blackface in a special episode of 30 Rock.

It seemed an auspicious time for lunch with Taki Theodoracopulos, the charismatic 75-year-old Greek socialite, pundit and founder of The American Conservative, who has been making racist remarks—and getting away with it—for decades now. Despite a reputation for venomous rhetoric, his byline has graced the pages of Hamptons Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New York Press, The Spectator, The Sunday Times, Esquire and Newsweek.

More recently, Mr. Theodoracopulos has been writing mostly for his own Web site, Taki’s Magazine. While the site bears the tagline: “Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar,” it is perhaps better known for a collection of race-baiting essays and blog posts by a rogue’s gallery of politically incorrect luminaries, including Pat Buchanan, Mr. McInnes and Redneck Manifesto author Jim Goad. In early April, the site posted an essay by John Derbyshire called “The Talk: Nonblack Version,” about what children should know about African-Americans (“Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally ... Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods”). Mr. Derbyshire was also a contributor to National Review, but not for long. The Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, quickly cut him loose, writing that the post “constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.”

Mr. Derbyshire quickly retreated from the public stage, and the news that he was undergoing chemotherapy for chronic lymphocytic leukemia may have even garnered him some sympathy points. But just a month later, Mr. Derbyshire landed a new gig on VDare.com, an anti-immigration site. His first article extolled the virtues of white supremacy.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center wasn’t surprised by the development. “More often than not, real racism lies right below the surface, and what holds it back is fear of criticism or fear of losing one’s career,” he said, noting that the center considers VDare a hate site.

Such outspoken racism is increasing, he said. “At a macro-level, what we’re seeing is a lot of white people feeling like they are losing their country ... that after Obama’s election, they’re drowning in a tide of color.”

The ethos of Taki's Mag (TakiMag.com)

Naturally, Mr. Derbyshire is still writing for Taki, who a few weeks after the notorious blog post was sitting in the Midtown restaurant Cognac, spooning up pink lobster bisque and chasing it with two large glasses of pinot grigio. Between bites, Mr. Theodoracopulos gossiped about his time working for—where else?—The New York Observer.

“I called A.M. Rosenthal from The New York Times ‘Abie,’ and his wife thought that was anti-Semitic,” he recalled in his languidly aristocratic accent. “How is that anti-Semitic?”

A genial man in a dapper blue suit and sparkling cuff links, Mr. Theodoracopulos bore a strong resemblance to Anthony Hopkins. He remembered being called into the office of then-owner Arthur Carter after Mr. Rosenthal’s wife, Shirley Lord, called to complain.

“Arthur would say ‘What is the problem, Taki?’” Mr. Theodoracopulos laughed. “I’d tell him, ‘The problem is that I’ve run out of shoe polish, Arthur. Would you mind if I took some from your hair?’”

He smiled.

“You get it?” Mr. Theodoracopulos asked. “Because his hair always looked like he rubbed it with shoe polish!”
When Fraser Nelson took over as editor of the Spectator, where Taki contributed a regular column, he jokingly told the columnist he would be fired. “He said, ‘No one is complaining about you anymore, Taki, so why are we paying you?’” Mr. Theodoracopulos recalled, snickering like a man who was having the last laugh. And perhaps he is.

In his inaugural editor’s “diary,” Mr. Nelson noted a change in the air. “It’s not that Taki is conforming to the world,” he wrote. “The world, I think, is finally conforming to him.”

Racial resentment seems especially uncharitable coming from someone like Mr. Theodoracopulos, a jet-setting playboy of good standing. His father, in addition to being an Olympic gold medalist in rowing, was a shipping baron. His grandfather, Panagiotis Poulitsas, was briefly the prime minister of Greece. After a career as a professional tennis player, and a short stint working in his father’s offices, Taki was recruited by Arnaud de Borchgrave, then senior editor of Newsweek, to go to Vietnam as a photographer.

“I didn’t want to work for my father, I didn’t want to be a shipper, or a tycoon’s son,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said of his beginnings in journalism.

He’s been married twice, currently to his wife of 31 years, Princess Alexandra Carlota Sophy von Schoenburg-Hartenstein, and has two children, “who have never disappointed me,” he said. His son, J.T., is a bike messenger; his daughter, Mandolyna, runs Taki’s Magazine. “She is actually the brains behind the site, because I don’t really read the Internet,” Mr. Theodoracopulos told us proudly.

The idea for the Web site came about after Mr. Theodoracopulos ceased his involvement with The American Conservative in 2007.

“At a certain time, I had to take a step back and say ‘Do I want to keep giving millions of dollars to magazines that no one reads, or something else?’” he recalled. Mandolyna, who spent the ’90s working for publications like Hamptons Magazine and, yes, The New York Observer (as a fact-checker under Graydon Carter, who not only hired her father for his original tenure at the Observer, but who went on to employ both father and daughter at Vanity Fair), then took off a decade to work as an interior designer before returning to journalism.

“I made peace with my dad years ago,” the London-based Ms. Theodoracopulos told us over the phone. “It’s really nice to have a family business.”

The only area where she and her father disagree, she told us, was the Middle East. (“I’m not saying Israel shouldn’t exist,” he said, “but they need to give back the occupied territories.”)

“Be nice to my dad,” Ms. Theodoracopulos warned before hanging up. “He’s one of the nicest, sweetest men you’ll ever meet.”

Taki Theodoracopulos with Arianna Huffington (Patrick McMullan)

MR. THEODORACOPULOS can be charming in person, which might explain how he’s been able to maintain some of his social cachet despite his disreputable opinions. Though he credits William Buckley at the National Review with giving him his first job, it wasn’t until he started his High Life social column in The Spectator that he found his niche. “I was a natural,” Mr. Theodoracopulos said. “People couldn’t believe what I wrote in High Life, but I didn’t care about access, I already had access. I knew what was going on. You have to get your foot in the door writing what you know about, and this was what I knew.”

That particular beat has shrunk with time. “Society doesn’t exist anymore ... or if it does, it doesn’t go out,” Taki sniffed. He is ditching his London home because, he explained, the city is “becoming overcrowded with Arabs.” He is more often found in his apartment on East 71st Street and is plotting a sailing trip to Cannes, where, he said, he will be shooting a movie with Norman Mailer’s son Michael.

During lunch, Mr. Theodoracopulos employed a number of epithets for various ethnic and racial groups. The n-word rolled off his tongue. He was unapologetic about his use of such terms, and made us uncomfortably complicit by leaning in conspiratorially and smiling while saying some of the more horrific things we’ve ever heard outside of a Quentin Tarantino film. He expressed disgust for professional athletes: “They have 12 kids and beat up on their wives, and she can’t go to court because she’s black and doesn’t have an education.” He praised Robert E. Lee and condemned Abraham Lincoln as “a murdering traitor.” He chuckled as he told us the story of a controversial Sunday Times editorial he once wrote: “I said that I thought I saw a gorilla once at Wimbleton. It was Venus Williams.”

Asked if he considered himself racist, Mr. Theodoracopulos shrugged. “It was very bad taste, but blacks make fun of us, why can’t we make fun of them?”

Unsurprisingly, Mr. Theodoracopulos’s mouth has gotten him into trouble over the years. “In this country, there are tremendous libel suits ... I’ve lost five libel cases myself,” he told us proudly. “Not four. Five.”
He sat serenely while we probed him about his xenophobia, then worked himself into a lather about the Saudis. “They are the ones who finance all the terror,” he said. “They eat their own shit. And we’re supposed to call them royals? These are not royal families ... I call them ‘ruling towelheads.’”

But even as he flaunted his most noxious opinions, Mr. Theodoracopulos was oddly eager to clear the record on at least one charge against him. Asked about an article in which he referred to himself as a “soi-disant anti-Semite,” he bristled.

“No! Everyone gets that quote wrong, because they don’t speak French. Soi-disant means ‘so-called.’ I am saying that everyone else calls me an anti-Semite!”

As in most matters, his opinion on this differs from that of the media. As The Guardian wrote, in fact, the term is generally translated as “self-styled.” Mr. Theodoracopulos indignantly told us that he had spoken French for most of his life and knew better than journalists what the translation was.

As if to prove that he had nothing against Jews, he continued, “All my WASP friends in America say, ‘What happened to our money, Taki?’ And I tell them, ‘You drank it all away, and the Jews and n---ers were able to get it.”

It seemed like a good time to mention we were Jewish.

“And you don’t drink a lot, do you?” Mr. Theodoracopulos replied with a smile. “You can’t ever say that the Jews are drunks. The WASPS are drunks.”

With that, the Greek socialite motioned for the waiter and ordered us a second glass of white wine. As it turned out, Mr. Theodoracopulos was right about one thing: we spent the rest of the day nursing a massive headache.

Ms. Arfin has not sought to publicly defend herself (indeed, her second-most-recent Tweet is some weird, illegible snark about the Global South), but that's where Vice founder Gavin McInnes swept in. His piece wherein he dug deep into matters like Ms. Arfin's use, in writing, of slang comparing President Obama to feces (everyone does it!) and compared her experience being written about to water torture was titled "The Lynching of Lesley Arfin." Strange fruit, indeed!

Being taken to task, in writing, for your super-out-of-touch-at-best sense of humor has not in recent history resulted in a person hanging from a tall tree. Not that Mr. McInnes's sense of the English language is terribly robust. As he recently wrote on Taki's Magazine:

I don’t think I’ve ever entered a bar without saying, “Hey homos” to my friends  or at the very least, “Oh, what are you guys doing here? I didn’t know this was  a gay bar.” The fact that everyone got their panties in a bunch over it is,  well, queer.

This is only the beginning of Mr. McInnes's writings, all of which exhibit the language and thought pattern of the soi-disant hipster: where you should be allowed to say whatever you want, and criticism of your every blessed utterance is the only thing that is offensive. (He elsewhere writes, "I wish there was a spooky resurgence of Nazi skinheads"--is Ms. Arfin sure this is the guy who ought to defend her from charges of casual racism?)

A primary critique of Girls has been the manner by which it presents its characters as overindulged from the moment of their birth, far too self-possessed as they scribble their memoirs with an eye only on self-fulfillment at the expense of contact with any world that might be described as "real." While Girls can be read as satirical, and its whitewashed world as the result of its characters' satirically cloistered points-of-view, the attitude it diagnoses of shock-value-craving mindlessness in the guise of individualism is apparently real.

Nice try, Captain.

Still smarting from last week, recent New York Observer punkee and How to Piss in Public author Gavin McInnes announced that he had gotten into a horrible car accident on the last leg of his FTW tour. His friend Steve (???) was in the car. Luckily, no one was hurt, though the footage looked gruesome.

By the way, this is what happens when you call a journalist "a Socialite reporter" and "a fucking bitch." (How dare anyone accuse us of being mere socialite writers! Also, don't copy and paste entire articles from other publications on your site...what are you, The Huffington Post?)

We wouldn't usually make light of a situation as scary as this, except that Mr. McInnes seemed to have no moral dilemma doing so himself...going so far as to have a hidden camera capture his apology to Steve, who doesn't accept and instead freaks out on the Vice founder.

Of course, none of it was real.

The accident, originally posted on Twitter March 21st, the same day our article about the prankster came out on the cover of The New York Observer:

Steve "leaving" the tour, and the subsequent blow-up:

Mr. McInnes "reveal":

Good prank! We're very happy we didn't take up our editor's suggestion and call Mr. McInnes offering our condolences after the event, since it would have played right into the piss-eater's hand.

You got served! (Wikipedia)

The Observer was sitting at Hooters, in one of the establishment's "finest booths" (our request), daintily sipping a Banana-Rama piña colata, and watching Vice's notorious co-founder Gavin McInnes imploding. "Why would I have gone all the way upstate to eat piss-covered cornflakes??" he screamed into our cell phone, drawing stares from the lunch crowd of really sad-looking single men. Beneath his dirty blonde beard, Mr. McInnes was turning beet red. "Why wouldn't I have ate the piss cornflakes in my house? Or in the office???"

We couldn't hear what the person on the other end of the line is saying, but whatever it was, the author of the new memoir of How to Piss in Public (Scribner, March 20) started to foam at the mouth in response. "I just told you why I pissed in the cornflakes! It was for the DVD! It matched with the card up your ass trick in the movie!"

Another pause, and Mr. McInnes (pronounced, for the last time, like McGuinness but with no "G,") started to stress points at an incoherent, rambling speed.

"I don't lie, dude! You got duped by your own prank!" he yelled at one point.

"I had already done it two weeks before the Gawker thing!" he said at another. Before hanging up, he has been reduced to schoolyard insults:

"Whatever, you're stupid, bye."

He looked at us. "I'm not going to give you a check for $1,000."

Before his semi-meltdown, the inflammatory jokester who once referred to Jesus as a gay Jew on Bill Maher's show, had told me two things: He couldn't remember anytime someone had "got him" with a good prank, and that as he's grown older and raised a family, he's really mellowed out.

We were happy to prove him wrong on both points.

In order to explain  The Observer's long con on Mr. McInnes, you have to know a little bit about his personal history. The Canadian-born 42-year-old is probably best known for his Do's and Don'ts column in the early days of Vice magazine, which he started with Suroosh Alvi and Shane Smith in 1994. If you know that, then you probably also know of his inglorious removal from the company after Viacom started funneling money into the site for a video content vertical, VBS.TV, in 2007.

This incident takes up only a small section of Mr. McInnes' memoir. He writes merely that "we negotiated a split and by the beginning of 2008 I had sold my shares for an obscene amount of money." He also compares his leaving Vice to a band that breaks up because "they don't like each other anymore, or more importantly, they don't respect what the other members do."

What Mr. McInnes did, essentially, was cause trouble. He got into fights (physical and verbal), took a ton of drugs, hung out with weirdos and freaks (and the occasional genius), and fucked with the media. He was a liability.

After his departure, Mr. McInnes founded the website StreetBonersandTVCarnage.com with his friend, Derrick "Pinky" Beckles. The site was a collection of Do's and Don'ts type photos (except now they were called Street Boners), video mashups from Pinky, and inflammatory columns by Mr. McInnes and his friends. (Full disclosure: The author is responsible for a short-lived column of terrible sex advice on the site.)

Even with the leash Vice kept him on, Mr. McInnes always liked to screw with other media outlets. In a chapter titled "Lying to the Press" he outlines his elaborate hoaxes, like dressing up as a Nazi skinhead for an interview with The New York Press, setting up a fake pitch meeting with MTV for the benefit of a journalist from Ottawa's Citizen, and convincing The Village Voice he had been knocked out by an MMA fighter he had randomly "chosen" after putting out a blog post offering to fly out on his own dime and fight anyone who was willing to go into the ring with him.

The strange part of that last prank, which The Voice ran in a 2009 feature called "Gavin McInnes Gets Knocked the Fuck Out" was that it was mostly true. Mr. McInnes had been destroyed in the ring by an MMA fighter, a member of an Oakland gang called the East Bay Rats that Mr. McInnes was trying to join for a Current TV series called The Immersionist. The "joke" was that the footage that The Voice saw was from the un-aired 2008 series...Mr. McInnes' call on his blog to fight anyone was made after he had already gotten "knocked the fuck out," and was an excuse to put the footage to some use.

Now, some may consider that a weird "gotcha" moment...either way, he was knocked out, right? It was much the same with a 2010 prank on Gawker, after the site failed to name him Hipster of the Decade. Posing as Street Carnage's editor Arvind Dilawar, he wrote in to Gawker's tips and concocted an elaborate scheme in which Gavin McInnes would be forced to eat piss-covered cornflakes should he win the contest.

He lost, but "thinking" that he'd won thanks to Mr. Dilawar's supposed Photoshopping of the results (in fact Mr. McInnes had done the doctoring himself), he sent a video to Gawker showing him eating his own urine with breakfast cereal.

Now, the prank wasn't that the cornflakes were not soaked in urine. They were. The joke was that Mr. McInnes had filmed himself eating pee-flakes months before, for a 2009 Sundance film called Gavin McInnes Is an Asshole, but he'd ended up leaving the footage on the cutting-room floor because "it was too gross." Not wanting to waste a good video of piss consumption, he sent the clip to Gawker under Arv's name, letting the world believe for a short while that he had been fooled.

Again, shame on us for believing him, but the fact remains that Gavin McInnes ate his own piss. Only the dates and the motives were changed.

This is where we came in. Mr. McInnes likes to screw with people, but he does not want to be considered a liar, especially since some of his real-life stories are so extreme. So in his memoir, he offers a $1,000 reward "to anyone who proves that an event narrated in these pages didn't occur."

During lunch, he explained that he made that promise because "shitheads" like James Frey have ruined the memoir by lying in their non-fiction life accounts. "Now, nobody will trust that your stories are real," Mr. McInnes complained. And since How to Piss in Public recounts how the author had a threesome during an "Asian cocaine orgy," got his parents stoned, and spent his bachelor party out in the woods on a 72-hour bender with his friends dressed as Klan members (among other things), it's very important that people know that he's telling the truth about his crazy life. He might be a lot of things, but Gavin McInnes is not a liar.

Except when we prove that he is. During lunch, we produced several old emails between ourselves and Mr. Dilawar, wherein the former editor boasts that the he actually did fool his boss for the Gawker stunt. Mr. McInnes' first response was to shake his head. "That's impossible...Arv was totally in on the joke," he said. "I mean, he knew we had shot the footage earlier, up in my summer home upstate. You can see in the video that I'm in that house, not where I live in Brooklyn. So why would I drive up to my summer home to eat piss-covered cornflakes for losing a bet?"

"Let's call Arv," he suggested. We concurred, and soon the two old friends were screaming at each other over the factual discrepencies of time and place (again, not whether or not the cornflakes were consumed, because that was just a given). Mr. McInnes was sweating: he didn't want to have to cut a check to a journalist for a $1,000 for lying in his book...that would be bad press on so many levels.

"I have the footage," Mr. McInnes seethed after hanging up on Mr. Dilawar, "and I can get you the filmmakers to tell you when it was shot."

We mulled that over. "Well, that's just their word against his." We demanded our money.

"I don't know why I'm so angry...this is ridiculous," Mr. McInnes sputtered. "I shot that video before the Gawker contest, that's just the truth."

"Yes," The New York Observer agreed sweetly. "Arv said you'd be pissed when we came up with this."

It took a moment for the double-cross to sink in. "You mean...Arv was lying right now?" Yes, he was. In fact, he had helped us forge the old emails, providing helpful details to get under Mr. McInnes skin...like the fact that the date of the video would be hard to prove, since it didn't end up on the DVD.

We waited for Mr. McInnes' response to getting played as hard as he had played the Village Voice and Gawker. He stared at us for a moment, got up from his chair, and walked halfway across the room.

Then he started laughing hysterically. "That was so good!" he gasped, clapping. "That's the best prank anyone's ever played...because I literally just promised myself yesterday that I wasn't going to get myself upset like that anymore."

"And you taught me a lesson," Mr. McInnes said, clearly warming up to the subject. "It's not because they say they have different information...you can take it or leave it. But when someone is holding up a fork and saying 'This is a knife, this is a knife,' you start getting indignant. You get angry because you lay it all out there, you know the truth, and it seems so simple, and someone else is saying 'I don't see it.' You get so worked up you're just like 'Blah, what? Gah!' Then you sound like the person who doesn't know what they're talking about."

We didn't get our $1,000 check, but we did have Mr. McInnes sign the back of our Hooters check with proof that The Observer had pulled one over on the ultimate media prankster. (The blue ink is Gavin's, the orange is just what our Hooters waitress wrote. A nice sentiment.)

Vice

By contrast, it includes a knowing dig at The New York Times food section ("Like all recipes you get from the Times, it takes at least six hours to marinate and another six hours to cook.") and dishes about drinks with fellow Fox News guest Ann Coulter ("I remember Coulter saying, 'What’s with all your tattoos? Have you not always had a high IQ?' but not much else.").

It also reveals that photographer Terry Richardson's signature sandwich recipe:

"Around noon I had some “Terrys.” It’s a dish created by Terry Richardson that involves slices of tomato, avocado, mayo, and cheese on top of toasted English Muffins (by the way, if your sandwich doesn’t involve bread that’s toasted, I ain’t interested). I like to add some banana peppers and salt and pepper into the mix. After two of these, I had some “Gavins,” which is my own recipe and involves dipping salt and vinegar chips in sour cream."

We all have to grow up sometime.

The book will be called The Death of Cool, but McInnes says the subtitle remains undetermined: he was considering "From Teenage Rebellion to the Hangover of Parenthood," but "the daddy thing" is only about a page and he doesn't want to mislead anyone. The rest is "basically a big pile of bar stories." There's the time he showed up for a blind date and discovered the girl was paralyzed, for example. And the time he gave himself gonorrhea of the throat.

"We didn't want it to come across as a memoir," he said. "It's really a punk rock version of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell."

He hopes to complete The Death of Cool in time for a summer 2011 release. Meanwhile, Street Boners--a book of style commentary from his current site, Street Carnage--is out May 27 from Grand Central.

In addition to humor, there will be "a tiny bit of sadness" in the form of heroin overdoses, and some discussion of the "intense satisfaction" he gets from raising his children.

"I'm not cool anymore," said McInnes, who is 39. "I gotta pass the torch to the next generation of wastoids."

Name firmly affixed to our lapel, we introduced ourselves to Andrew WK, whom we found to be—in contrast to his unhinged stage persona—almost unnervingly placid. He shared some grooming tips. Over-washing, it seems, is probably the cause of our admittedly frizzy hair. "You think you need these things, but you don't," he told us, referring to haircare products. He recommended an extended period without shampoo. "I know about it—I've used a lot of extensions, a lot of filler," he explained.

Mr. WK also lamented the lack of student presence at his club, Santo's Party House, which is located across the street from N.Y.U.'s Lafayette dorm. Apparently, the residents generally walk by the dancehall's usually crowded door "like it's not even there."

We suggested that perhaps the N.Y.U. populace, so used to being viewed as the scourge of downtown nightlife, didn't realize they were welcome.

"No, we really want to involve them, that enthusiastic, excited portion of New York. Where do they go—Bleecker Street or whatever?" Hmm. They probably feel wanted already!

Meanwhile, the New Pornographers' A.C. Newman explained that he prided himself on being boring before, eying our voice recorder, he implored, "Don't make me sound like I am." 

Eventually, everyone was corralled from the makeshift smoking lounge into the recording space to film the video, a spoof of Michael Jackson's 1985 "We Are The World" extravaganza (sample lyric: "We're giving cash to all the trust fund kids this year"). It was not exactly a humble self-acknowledgment to line up local New York popular kids as though they were Michael Jackson's all-star cast: there was ubiquitous society truffle-pig Moby, comedian Seth Herzog, LCD Soundsystem's Nancy Whang, Battles guitarist Ian Williams, members of the band Cheeseburger, Okkervil River's Will Sheff, Vice founder Gavin McInnes (whose level of vociferousness seemed rise whenever he put on his white, reflective wayfarers), and Fred Armisen (who ducked out before we could coax him into further insulting the governor)--on a set of bleachers, giving the scene the look of a yearbook photoshoot where the nerdy had been intentionally misdirected to the wrong place. Mr. Harrington--who, at some point, changed into an outfit consisting of a pair of bright red briefs, yellow knee-socks, a white T-shirt, and rainbow striped gloves--acted as the conductor, engaging in some Mick Jagger-style stomping and issuing directives related to the functioning of recording equipment. After a brief battle with the headphones ("Who's hearing nothing?...That's everybody!"), an impending crowd mutiny was quelled with pizza and crates of Bud Light delivered by studio employees, proving that N.Y.U. students might not have been so far out of place after all. 

People scattered as others filed through the main room to film individual takes. Out in the hall, conversation turned, as it does in these social climes, to the trials of becoming the most famous person to emerge from one's hometown.

Mr. Williams (from Johnstown, Penn.) first suggested that Johnny Weissmuller, the original Tarzan, was his most serious competition before remembering that he also had Charles Bronson to contend with. Everyone agreed that Mr. Bronson would be difficult to beat. 

When pressed to name our hometown's most prominent son, we could only cite the members of various jam bands. This answer prompted much teasing of the Transom. 

"I come from the land of jam bands [New Hampshire], and I am pleased to say I never got into jam bands," insisted Mr. Sheff. "Phish and the Dead and all that stuff. Dave Matthews Band! You know some people say, 'I was into this band before they were huge?' I wasn't into them when they were huge, when I was younger, when I thought everything on the radio was good. I had nothing at stake--I wasn't trying to be cool."

It was agreed that nobody liked the the Dave Matthews Band (though Mr. Newman, who throughout the evening was the one most suspicious of that voice recorder, did say that Dave Matthews seems liked a good person). 

Did Moby have discerning taste as a child?

"I wish I could say yes," he said. "But I liked everything when I was growing up. If someone was putting it on the radio when I was nine years old, that meant it was good. Though, there's some music that scared me when I was little because it seemed too grown-up. Like Meatloaf--'Paradise by the Dashboard Light'--because I knew there was something weird and wrong going on there. You know, the Phil Rizzuto part? But literally, from the time I was eight or seven until I became a punk rocker, I liked everything. I was utterly indiscriminate." 

And what about Mr. Harrington?

"Oh, no, I bought everything. My dad really liked Elvis and my gauges were really off. There was a station--maybe the Fordham radio station--and there was show in the evenings that was like homework music, a kids show. Songs that were like 'Fish eyes, fish eyes/Roly poly fish eyes,' like an avant garde band. [Ed. note: We think he means 'Fish Heads.' by Barnes and Barnes] And it was one tune down from WFMU, which plays legitimately avant garde stuff. When I was a kid, I would mistune it and end up listening to some John Cage stuff and like, waiting for the joke."

“Should I accept everybody? Or should I only accept people who are my friends?” Ms. Arfin wondered recently in the conference room of her magazine’s parent company, Colossal Media, which occupies a buzzing, bilevel space just off Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. “I deleted my MySpace,” she continued. “I wanted to keep Facebook tight.”

Ms. Arfin, who had previously been editor at large at Missbehave, was tapped to edit the two-year-old, 110,000-circulation quarterly in August after founding editor Mary H. K. Choi left to become features editor at the hip-hop magazine Giant. Before that, Ms. Arfin wrote for Vice, including an article called “The Vice Guide to Finding Yourself,” which advised, “Telling your dad to fuck off and being prepared to fight him.” At 29, she’s mellowed, she said. “My taste has gotten more mainstream as I’ve gotten older. … I don’t have as much interest in being cool and seeking out what’s underground to impress my friends.”

How many Facebook “friends” does Ms. Arfin have anyway?

“Like eight hundred.”

Back in real life, she is close to It-girl–turned–premium-cable-Mormon Chloë Sevigny, with whom she recently attended the reopening party for the Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami. Other guests included George Hamilton and some unfortunate swans. (“Surreal,” Ms. Arfin said.)

“Chlo,” as the editor calls her, appears on the cover of the first retooled Missbehave: her hair a nest of complicated braids, her pout slightly less fierce than it was when she staggered onto movie screens 13 years ago in Kids. Another of Ms. Arfin’s pals, Mark Jacobs—the former Paper writer, not the fashion designer—wrote the accompanying piece. Yet another friend, Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who once hired Ms. Arfin as an intern at his magazine, has taken Ms. Arfin’s old role as editor at large at Missbehave, where he’ll be contributing a column of ideas conceived while stoned.

“She’s incredibly confident,” Mr. McInnes said of his former protégé. “Maybe that’s why celebrities like hanging around her.” (Ms. Arfin has also worked as a fashion stylist, but found herself frustrated by the demands of personalities like Naomi Campbell, who apparently refused to put on her own socks.)

What about her management style? “I could never think of her as my boss,” Mr. McInnes said. “That would be weird.”

Ms. Arfin has long, dark hair with just a few strands of white at the roots; several tattoos (“nine or something” she said); and Clark Kent–style glasses. In a comfortable-looking brown sweater that fairly swallowed her slight frame, she called to mind the sort of smart-alecky girl Winona Ryder or Christina Ricci used to play in teen comedies: more kid sister than sex kitten, tough on the outside but willing to let her guard down in the final act.

“I would like to think I’m a superhero and can handle anything,” Ms. Arfin said of her cool-girl persona. “But I’m not. My feelings still get hurt. I’m very sensitive.” She laughed a little at this, but still conveyed the directness and clarity of someone who’s spent a lot of time talking to people—friends, therapists, group members, readers—about herself.

That may be because Ms. Arfin is a recovering drug user and alcoholic who chronicled her tumble into addiction in a 2007 book, Dear Diary. It told the story of a self-professed “high-maintenance Long Island Jew” who went from all-ages punk rock shows to getting high in the Lower East Side on 9/11 and wondering “what the big deal was” as the World Trade Center smoldered just blocks downtown.

Ms. Arfin sent copies of her book to “every single person in the world I admire,” she said, a list that included the comic actress and writer Amy Sedaris and director Judd Apatow, along with her old professors from Hampshire College.

“I didn’t get any response,” she said. “But it didn’t matter.”

After rehab at South Oaks and the Betty Ford Center, Ms. Arfin has been clean, she said, for six years. Her blog, Cafe Con Lesley, still documents frequent nightcrawling—Spike Lee, Jay-Z and John Stamos all make appearances—but now, she said, when things get weird, she goes home early. “I have friends who still do drugs, but if they’re going out and doing coke, I leave.”

After Ms. Arfin failed to catch publishers’ interest with two post–Dear Diary book proposals (one she described as “Our Bodies, Ourselves for punk rock kids”), she took some time off and traveled in India. Upon returning, she was offered the job at Missbehave, whose pages she hopes to make more “accessible,” less “urban.”

“I don’t wanna see the word ‘dope’ anymore. Things like that,” Ms. Arfin said. “I’m not into like Electroclash and boom boxes and bamboo earrings. I’ve never really been into that stuff.”

She proudly listed some of her current interests: the Dixie Chicks (“Oh my gosh, they’re so talented!”), Teen Vogue, Gossip Girl, VH1’s Celebrity Rehab and A&E’s Intervention, which she called “the funniest and saddest show.”

“I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures’ anymore,” she said, despite the fact that she once wrote “The Vice Guide to Guilty Pleasures.” “Moving onwards, I don’t want to feel guilty about the things that make me happy.”

And she doesn’t want Missbehave to be just about her friends, either, real or virtual. “I wanna get bigger covers. … Believe me, I don’t know how to do this. I’m, like, learning as I go along.”

mhaber@observer.com