Mark Baker of Mansion and Lotus fame (among others) rises early, loves Russia, accepts responsibility for the superficial lounges he helped create, and has fun while trying not to get stabbed by irate, rebuffed club-goers (again).

How did the day start for you today? Actually, today was an early start. I get calls from Europe [early] because nobody [there] has any idea what time it is here, so my day started at 7 a.m. I always leave my phone on because you never know what catastrophes or overdoses or suicide cases or whatever our friends and clients ... People with suicide these days is a really heavy deal. There’s a lot of kids out there who just give up, and that’s part of running a network of friends and clients, basically just keeping an eye on everyone. And being accessible.

You get a lot of these crises? I get crises, I get idiots, I get friends I get ... models.

Though the death of 20-year-old Kazakh model Ruslana Korshunova after falling from her New York balcony has been officially ruled a suicide, wags had already predicted that cranks would immediately seize on conspiracy theories involving the Russian mafia. From digging through Korshunova's blog entries to Zapruder-filmic analysis of death scene photos, no menacingly Slavic stone shall remain unturned. And of course, when you do look under the biggest, heaviest, most lichen-encrusted rock, you'll find Geraldo Rivera airing footage of Korshunova's corpse on a stretcher.