HYPERDOUGH
A few weeks ago I had a Proustian epiphany. I was passing by the city center of Amsterdam when all of a sudden, the smell of sweet fried dough coming from the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts hit my olfactory receptors. It happened under the Christmas lights at dusk, that particular time of the day when the natural light is about to be replaced by the artificial lights from the city. At this precise moment, the glowing billboards and displays from the stores had about the same intensity as that of the remaining daylight. Both together created a flat and shadowless world. A kind of fake atmosphere in which something feels missing despite the sensorial overload of stimuli around. As if it were a hyper-real CGI rendering of reality.
Along with the smell of dough, a warm airwave coming out of a shopping center caressed my face. It felt nice and soothing, like a spell that makes you succumb to the delights of capitalism. This intoxicating, numbing seduction transported me to the main commercial street of any capital city in the world where I had been before. I could have been in Barcelona, Rome, New York, or Hong Kong. I had the sensation that all of them belonged to the same abstract, homogeneous, and ubiquitous mass; that moment in time was not just a moment in Amsterdam. It was happening simultaneously everywhere else, too. As if all time zones had melted into one and jet lag was not really an option, but a permanent state of mind. Lacking a better name for it, I’m calling this sensation/concept/object or whatever it is, Hyperdough.
Hyperdough fills up your mouth so nicely when you say it… HY.PER.DOUGH. It’s like biting into a good piece of coffee cake with chocolate Kahlua ganache in your gentrified neighborhood’s new organic-gluten-free-fair-trade café. That sweet and caffeinated momentary ecstasy—which is opposed, by the way, to the dark and violent history of sugar and coffee—that makes you think that everything is just fine.