Love letter to Gianna Michaels

So I talk with you about my last successes

About my last verses, about myself.

I barely looked at you. I looked at your coffee

That you were stirring

Absent, as in trance,

As it was the most interesting thing in the planet.

(Rodolfo Serrano, From then, a year)

Dear Gianna:

I was waiting to send you a letter, as the same way that I use to wait for all the important things. You know, the Sunday afternoons are the parenthesis of the glitter and the shrapnel, a time for non-shaving, writing the gloomy reviews that I will publish during the week, missing friends, gossiping in old lovers facebooks. And write letters. The Sunday afternoons I use to think about you, about the way we met (virtually) a decade ago, before the HD porn, before your sign up with Brazzers, before –and that´s a lot of time!- the Sasha Grey´s first video.

Some weeks ago, one friend of mine asked me why I never wrote a whole book about pornography, and I tried to explain him that I was not in the mood for living even months inside the deepest melancholy. He thought I was joking, but maybe you and I know that that’s the truth, and that the virtual/emotional links –have you seen Spike Jonze´s Her?- are the hallway of the authentic desire. Far away from it, there is other thing called reality, but who cares about it.

When I met you, Gianna, I can remember it, I was astonished for your disarming tenderness. My generation was saturated of blondes with silicone –the “Jenna Jameson Icon” was definitely harmful-, and the new waves of the post-Vhs-porn were not solving our real questions. Amazons goddesses, fake blonds, is so sad if you think about it. But suddenly you brought a kind of happy tenderness to our screens, an appropriation to the happiness and the closeness so shameless, as if everything in your universe was a big naïve game, as you were able to fully express yourself, miles away from the other girls or the herculean-erected-boys. All were excuses for showing your smile to the camera. And what a way of smiling, Gianna, with this shinny gesture that I never found in the bars that I visited during my post-teenage years! The fact that a porn star who could stoically endure a bukkake was more human and gentle that the icy and distant posh girls who were starting to study economics or laws in private universities is just mind-bending. The other girls had tons of urgent troubles –shitty ex, shitty parents, shitty professors-, but they had no tenderness at all. And, if they would have it, they would have exchange it only for a small flat and two children. I studied a degree in Melancholy –the lessons started at 3:00 AM- looking for a girl who could achieve the mark of your smile –and not the one of your cleavage, who at the end, it was the less important thing in my way of seeing your movies. You gave me the unwavering faith of knowing that women could smile that way when they woke up. The man who have seen your dawns and your gestures during waking up is a lucky bastard. Sometimes I think about who beautiful would have been recording you during your sleep, six or eight hours as in Warhol´s sleep, only to have this brief seconds in which you open your eyes and notice that, after all, the universe keeps surrounding you. Even the circuits of the camera could have been astonished.

I know that during the last months I´m busy with other things in my mind, you don´t have to quarrel with me. I must confess that Skin Diamond doesn´t mean very much to me, that maybe Stoya is classy, and of course, that Maria Ozawa is keeping an unquestionable beauty. But, as in many other things, in porn I keep my gratitudes as an old romantic. This morning, when I saw your picture in the Brazzers´web page, I felt like if my universe cracked. Not for the picture itself –the pass of time is respecting you, and I´m sure that in some years you will achieve the wise and graceful gesture who serves as a crown for the good women-, but for the category in which you were located: MILF. What do they mean by putting you in MILF? In which moment, Gianna, does the time played with us and exchanged our place, converting us in icy lovers from other generation, statues of dust and sand in the lost palace of Resnais´ Marienbaud? We were born during 83, so, not so far from here we were writing –you, with your body against the light trapped by the camera, me, finishing my Ph. D. and finishing my first books-, playing as hard as we could, against the life and the time itself, in a universe who just doesn´t had Sunday evenings? Can we survive in the thunderstorm, we will go on fighting, you in new movies, me teaching in empty classes and distant students? We both make our living by showing ourselves and playing with knowledge, and for that reason our sins will be judged more strictly. God forgive us. He knows that you are more sincere and candid, and that you wear the most difficult mask in the History.

My dear friend, I wish you all the peace that you gave us, the hope that you disseminate in each one of your frames, the happiness that was crystallized in your smile. If I think in all the girls that I met who were swearing that they own the world, I notice that you have been the most honest of all. You faced your challenge from the tenderness, the beauty, and not from the selfishness.

Always yours, kindly:

Aa. R.