ChucK:
> What interests me now is that I was no longer an American in
> quite the way one is supposed to be in order to paint like an
> American. You simply can not look at Spanish and Mexican
> painters, read French and Russian novels, and look at
> California through those eyes and still be an American. Maybe
> the rightwing is right, California isn't really part of America.
Uhmm. Maybe not. Umberto Eco argues that "hyper-real" imitation of European art (and kitsch) is the quintessence of Americanism http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/eco2.html
The inwardly looking anti-intellectual small-town populism is your enemy, not Americanism, and such populism is not unique to the US. It is spread world-wide, and it is raising its ugly head in Europe. Having read L'Etranger you would feel out of place virtually anywhere, especially in the suffocating atmosphere of European podunks (cf. a recent Polish flick "Big Animal" http://www.vh1.com/movies/movie/164349/plot.jhtml).
Wojtek