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With his will sufficiently weakened by the rigors of spewing 80-point news headlines for hours on end, Sploid co-editor (and one-time Defamer guest editor) Choire Sicha was persuaded to spend some quality time observing superflack/documentarian Dan Klores in the wild for the LAT. Now that the master spinner has turned his Dan Klores Communications into the go-to image rehabilitation factory for celebrities whose only other choice is the sweet release of a botched sleeping pill overdose, he's indulging his love of movies by directing docs like Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, and finds himself in the interesting position of having a publicist of his own:

After decades of talking to the press, of beating and seducing and beguiling the trades and gossips and reporters, surely Dan Klores is his own best client.

Which may be why he has hired his own publicist. "I had to hire my own PR people, which was OK, he's very good, this guy Tom at Leslee Dart's group, ya know? He's very good. Cuz I don't want my team doing this. Very weird, very weird."

The mind boggles at how anything gets accomplished when a publicist hires one of his own kind, and many questions are raised about the logistics of flack-outsourcing. When the two pubs issue competing lies, whose wins out, the client's, or the more skillfully-worded deception? When one party poses a question to the other, does it begin a chain of "no comments" that stretches into infinity? We could go on with these ruminations, but the warm trickle of blood issuing forth from our ear is a clear sign that we're not meant to understand the mechanics of such a potentially complicated arrangement.