Got something to get off your chest? Turn it into art, then spin it at the open mike. In Portsmouth, the hosts of Beat Night are looking for participation from poets interested in performing their written words in improvisational concert with Groove Bacteria at the monthly jazz and poetry session at the Press Room. In Dover, Primal Tongue, a monthly open mike at Adelle’s Coffeehouse, is seeking prose readers ready to read short pieces of fiction or non-fiction. Featured readers get 40 minutes to read a piece of their choice.

Fat Dog Shellfish has applied to New Hampshire Fish and Game Department for a license to cultivate oysters in an upweller-style nursery at Great Bay Marine. The proposed location is a boat slip similar to those available for recreational boats.

Citing personal commitments that will temporarily take them away from the series this season, co-founders of the storytelling program “A Winter’s Tale” announced that the show will take a break this winter.

New Hampshire’s obligatory seat on the New England Fishery Management Council is currently held by David Goethel, who is completing his last term as a Council member. New Hampshire also has two at-large seats on the council.

Community members are invited to submit names for the next Portsmouth Poet Laureate, whose job it will be to “build community through poetry.” Nominations for the new poet laureate are due by Feb. 15.

Jared Diamond examines what traditional societies can teach the Western world in “The World Until Yesterday”

When Jared Diamond first began doing field work in the highlands of New Guinea in the 1960s, tribal warfare was a recent memory and writing was still new to many of the tribes, including the Fore, the first tribe that Diamond worked with. Diamond returned to New Guinea many times in the intervening years, and each time, the changes in the people were remarkable. In 1998, he came back to the island to work on an environmental survey and was struck by how different New Guinean society had become in a few short years. “In the next room, there was a New Guinean using a computer. He was doing engineering diagrams; he was Fore, and his father had been the first person in the southern Fore area who learned how to write,” Diamond says.

A new documentary revisits the Central Park Jogger case and explores how racism, hysteria and institutional failure wrongfully convicted five teenagers in 1990. The new documentary “The Central Park Five,” directed by Sarah Burns, her husband, David McMahon, and her father, Ken Burns, gives the five men, now all in their late 30s and early 40s, the chance to tell their own story. It also contextualizes the case, exploring how investigators could ignore evidence and wring confessions out of the five men all in the name of a swift resolution.

Rated R: The subject of the hunting and killing of Osama bin Laden is an uncomfortable one at best, and something that seems distasteful for a mainstream movie. It is the story of the most powerful nation in the world trying to find one man for 10 years, torturing quite a few people along the way, and then killing him. Whether that was revenge or justice or simply for the greater good, it happened outside the legal system, and the world cheered.

Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1979: Although his springboard was F. W. Murnau’s 1922 copyright-pirated German silent, Herzog made the story his own. Once again he lenses a subtle, complex and pathos-infused performance from the nutcase Kinski, and Isabelle Adjani makes self-sacrifice look sexy.

Beck’s Song Reader at Buoy: Toward the end of 2012, Beck released “Song Reader,” an album’s worth of new music exclusively in sheet music form—never before released or recorded. The folks at Buoy have taken up the implicit challenge, assembling five groups to learn, arrange, and perform the songs. The performance is one night-only, on Friday, Feb. 1. Musicians include members of Tan Vampires, Tiger Saw, Pearl & the Beard, and many more. They’ll play “Song Reader” in its entirety, with four groups playing five songs each.

As for purchasing music, 2012 was the first year digital sales topped physical sales. Most of the digital sales happened at iTunes, Amazon and eMusic. Music sales are down at the big-box chains that sell music, like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, but overall sales were up 3.1 percent in 2012 over 2011, which is a record high.

With Congress seemingly unable to confront our most pressing problems, the real work of democracy is going local this year in a big way. It’s a trend that has been building for some time, as more cities and states stop waiting around for Congress and devise their own policies to counter corporate power and create more sustainable and resilient local economies.

John Rauh, New Castle resident and founder of Americans for Campaign Reform, which supports public funding for federal elections, points out that we are the only democracy in the world that relies to the extent that we do on private financing of elections, to the tune of $6 billion spent on the most recent federal campaigns ($700 million more than was spent in 2008), much of it going to more than one million presidential ads airing between June 1 and Oct. 29. “I think we saw the impact of Citizens United, where massive amounts of money was spent independently. It’s very clear from our polling that the public is very upset about the impact of money on politics,” Rauh says.

Prior to 1985, the NH Legislature reviewed 250 bills per year, but today there are over 1,100 and this number doesn’t even take local issues into account. Those calculations are courtesy of the Live Free or Die Alliance, a bi-partisan non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging citizen participation in the often-confusing political process

“There are two fundamental issues when it comes to everyday life: food and energy,” says Greg Pahl, a Vermont resident and energy journalist. And while New England states have been leading the nation on the issue of access to local food, Pahl has applied those same concepts to energy. He lays out the pros of locally generated and locally owned energy in his 2012 book, “Power from the People: How to organize, finance and launch local energy projects.”