Tal Bachman

Al Jazeera English TV’s Avi Lewis is the latest PromArt recipient to crawl out from under the PMO’s Panderbus and explain himself: he got some money to promote a Canadian independent film in Australia and New Zealand, and helped get it a distribution deal. “It was a no-brainer,” he writes in the Toronto Star. “The proceeds of the sale went straight to the National Film Board, defraying the public money that had helped to make the film in the first place.”

The National Post‘s Kelly McParland believes Tal Bachman “has a pretty successful career going, and can’t possibly need Ottawa to pay his air fare.” But he wasn’t too busy, famous or rich to set the record straight on his blog about his turn at the PromArt trough, expanding on and clarifying a few points he and Eye‘s Marc Weisblott discussed yesterday. The basic story—musician asked to play guitar for South African orphans; Canada’s New Government appalled—hasn’t changed, but he makes his political leanings quite clear.

Tal Bachman, singled out by the government as one of the “wealthy rock stars” unworthy of public funding to take their acts abroad, says he never applied for any funding and explains to Eye‘s Marc Weisblott just how the trip went down: