Kari Rittenbach, ​“Cry Baby” 

I feel like you are not worthy
of my word
of my feelings
but they still exist and need a place to go.¹

What’s the etymology of a cry-baby ?

1.
Doctors in France are studying how infants can be taught rudimentary sign language in order to express their needs more directly and efficiently, and (optimally) spare their caretakers the decibels: It is impossible to determine the difference between a cry due to hunger and a cry due to thirst.²

2.
In John Waters’s musical romp Cry-Baby (1990), it is the band of delinquent youths — viz. Johnny Depp, Ricki Lake, and daddy Iggy Pop — who display their feelings plainly at moments of crisis and/​or sudden beauty. An emotional intelligence expressed from the dead-center of the eye, in tears viscous as cum.

3.
In 1966 an engineer at the Thomas Organ Company in Sepulveda, California invented a midrange resonant boost (MRB) circuit and placed it in a volume pedal to sell to electric trumpet players. Frank Zappa applied the wah-wah to his Switchmaster in 1967 at a gig in New York City and gave one to Jimi Hendrix shortly thereafter. Also known as the Cry Baby, the pedal profoundly infected the psychedelic atmosphere of Hendrix, rising: I come back to find the stars misplaced / And the smell of a world that has burned.³

4.
A sore loser, especially in politics.


The simple schoolyard taunt — die-cut and reflexively articulated in mirror-tile, here (Cry Baby, 2025) — reverberates with the ongoing shame of the vulnerability-slur. Your feelings don’t belong to this para-pedagogical environment…

Who does not feel in the flows of his desire both the lava and the water?⁴

What remains is the impression: impactful psychic hurt (and shaped plexi) rolled through a press with sufficient tension, heat, and plenty of ink to pull a relief print. And on repetition: overlapping ghosts, stray geometries, broken phrases. This cumulative concrete poetry (FAKE, 2025) results in part from the randomness of the physical process, and fury; much like the pattern of footprints left by ecstatic high steps on the nightclub’s checkered dancefloor (intimacy a better place, 2025). Exertion as a kind of reclamation; re-constitution.

Expelling hourly on a thermal printer, the re-programmed poem-machines transmit emotional residues differently — lighter in letter, longer in lyric. Whereas printed receipts mark our transactions and cash exchanges daily — measuring time, place, and experience via exponential accrual; stubs gathered and stuffed deep into pockets, billfolds, handbags — Ford’s printer paintings (I and II, both 2025) instead perform an actuarial accounting for the tender-hearted.

Won’t you pull up a stool and spill your guts?

Go ahead and cry, baby.


¹ Raque Ford, Cry Baby, ed. Attilia Fattori Franchini (Vienna: Wild Seeds 4, 2025), 53.
² H. B. Valman, ​“Crying Babies,” The British Medical Journal, Vol. 280, No. 6230 (Jun. 21, 1980): 1522.
³ The Jimi Hendrix Experience, ​„Up From The Skies,“ Axis: Bold as Love, Polydor/​Track, 1967.
⁴ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 67.