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Last weekend, some 40 Alaskans journeyed down to Louisiana for the Blackpot music and food festival. The two-day festival is in its tenth year and takes place in and around the city of Lafayette in the south central part of the state. The weekend included a cook off, 25 bands, camping, jamming and lots of dancing.

Many of the Alaskans are musicians, music appreciators and friends who know each other through the Alaska music scene, and their trip has become a tradition.

Hear their voices and music from the Pine Leaf Boys here:

“I love how the Cajun culture marries love of food, love of dancing, love of community, and it reminds me of home.” –Kate Consenstein, Anchorage

“The energy is just so positive. I feel like if you come here it’s like getting a cultural hug.” –WeeBee Aschenbrenner, Cantwell, Alaska

“We got Cajun music. We got blues. We got rock and roll. We got zydeco.” -Paul “Bird” Edwards, Eunice, Louisiana

“One of the things we have a lot of at our festival is food—from everything and anything deep fried, to some of the great Cajun dishes like gumbo and jambalaya and étouffées.” –Derek Landry, Lafayette, Louisiana

The Juneau Symphony season premieres this weekend with a performance called “New Beginnings.” The concerts will be Troy Quinn’s first shows as the new conductor. He said that their first piece, Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” is especially fitting.

“It was his first arrival here to America … and so it’s kind of appropriate for me to be here, my first new arrival, and that’s our big work,” Quinn said.

They’ll also play Shastakovich’s “Festive Overture,” and Massanet’s “Meditation” from his opera “Thaïs” with special guest violinist Luanne Homzey. Quinn said he is enjoying his work in Juneau — a position with a unique job description.

“‘Conductor’ really comes from the word ‘to teach,’ so the Latin word,” Quinn said. “So there is the teaching element involved with it. And it’s also to inspire the musicians to play at their most passionate and capable level. You know, the conductor doesn’t make a sound.”

Saturday’s concert is at 8 p.m. and Sunday’s at 3 p.m. at Juneau-Douglas High School. Both performances include one-hour pre-concert conversations with Quinn. Sunday’s concert will also be broadcast on KRNN and KRNN.org. Tickets begin at $17 and can be purchased at juneausymphony.org.

The Juneau Assembly wants public comment on an ordinance that will define the marijuana business in the capital city. It specifies where marijuana can be grown, processed and sold.

Assemblymember Karen Crane said the Juneau Planning Commission spoke about wanting to preserve neighborhoods.

“But they only preserve neighborhoods inside the urban service area,” Crane said. “They have left open action in neighborhoods outside urban service area, and I think there needs to be more discussion about this.”

The city has a moratorium that expires at the end of the year on marijuana businesses. After that, pot entrepreneurs will be able to apply for conditional use permits. Crane said she’d like to hear more input before the deadline.

“I know there’s a lot of pressure to make these decisions but this decision, I’d like to have some more discussion on — instead of being pushed into making it right now,” Crane said.

The public gets a chance to weigh in at the next assembly meeting on Nov. 9.

Watch Rebecca File and Annie Bartholomew of Fairbanks’ experimental psych-folk band Harm perform in this Red Carpet Concert.

The performance was recorded Oct. 7, following their KRNN Dynamic Duos performance in Juneau.

The 5th annual Woosh Kinaadeiyi Poetry Grand Slam is Saturday. Spoken word poets have been competing for the last year and now the best of the best will perform and vie for the top spot.

You can begin to misbehave by starting small.

Stroll the city and don’t use the crosswalks.
Talk to strangers.
Bite hard candies.
Check out a huge stack of books from the library and disregard the due dates.
Bring a dozen rainbow-sprinkled doughnuts to work
and don’t share them.

These are words from Woosh K co-founder Christy NaMee Eriksen’s “A Good Girl’s Guide to Misbehaving.”

After awhile,
you can try staying up past your bedtime.
When your alarm goes off, push snooze every 5 minutes for an hour.

Transition into the morning by daydreaming.
Have ideas with your coffee.

While she won’t compete this Saturday, she’ll voice this piece as one of several opening performers at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center.

“It sounds so aggressive, the idea of a poetry slam. But it’s actually kind of been dubbed the friendliest competition in town. It really is about being able to share our word, share our stories in a very supportive, inclusive environment,” she says.

Eriksen says there can be differences between traditional poetry and what people can expect to hear at the grand slam.

“Spoken word is written with the intent to share it with others. So it’s different than maybe what you write in a diary and hide under your pillow. It’s work that you are willing to give to an audience and are willing to kind of perfect it in a way that makes sure that what you’re trying to convey gets conveyed,” she says. And its roots are varied.

“It’s come out of really rich traditions of hip-hop, resistance and social justice, so a lot of times spoken word poetry has been used as a voice for people who maybe don’t otherwise feel like they have a voice in community, or artistic circles—in the literary scene—whatever. And for that reason is why spoken word has always kind of been a hook for me personally. It’s been kind of my language of liberation is what I often say. I can say things in poetry that I can’t say in English, you know, sitting with someone,” she says.

On stage, Eriksen will be joined by hosts Conor Lendrum and KXLL’s Annie Bartholomew, the Woosh K House Band, Dee Jay De Rego, Amy Pinney, Caroline Garcia, Ziggy Unsicker, Erika Bergren, Fysh Houck, Mike Christenson, David Parish, Maureen Longworth and Christina Apathy.

The Grand Slam begins at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. Admission is pay as you can.