Notes from the siege

6 p.m. Still under siege here. Nobody allowed in. Nobody allowed out, sometimes. Sometimes they let people out, but with a warning that you can't come back in. Since I have a firm policy of rarely leaving my apartment anyway, this has not greatly affected me.

During some exciting SWAT activity, I pointed my video camera out my window. I shot images of the SWAT team breaking down a door with a sledgehammer and entering the Mexican Consulate, M-16s at the ready. It was cool.

Turns out nobody else got that shot. The TV cameras couldn't get the angle I had. They were outside the zone. I was inside the zone.

So the footage has value. I made some calls to local stations. They were interested. KTLA smuggled a guy inside enemy lines. He came up to my apartment and dubbed the footage to his Betacam.

KTTV was also interested. Their field producer was stunned that KTLA managed to get in the zone. But he got the LAPD to agree to take a tape from me and hand it to him.

I don't know how this stuff works. I have talked to, no kidding, 12 different people at different levels of the various local news stations. One guy yelled at me that he thought he had an exclusive and why am I talking to other stations and THAT'S NOT COOL, BUDDY. Huh? It was just a ploy, though. He thought he could bully me into it.

TV news people are nasty, nasty, nasty people. Some of them.

I wonder if some of the reporters I talk to are locally famous. I wouldn't know. I haven't watched TV since 9-11, and rarely watched local news anyway. I wonder if they're offended when I don't recognize them on the phone.

Linda Gonzales was nice. I did recognize her when she called. I think. She told me I could get more money selling the footage to everyone who wanted it, instead of trying for an exclusive. She said she would spread the word to all the other news crews hanging out with her--and she'd dub the tape for them, too.

Linda Gonzales seems like an honest person, and she has excellent Spanish pronunciation, so I decided to believe her. I said go ahead and give it to everybody.

Now the individual stations are supposed to call me if they want to use it, and we work it out. Of course, they could just use it and I'd never know.

To tell the truth, I wish I'd never shot the tape. There was stuff I was supposed to do today.

Anyway, if you see these shots on the news, that was me who shot it.