Learning & Tech❯Tech & Coding

November 4, 2026

Special Concerts

The Philip Glass Ensemble returns to Portland for Powaqqatsi, an artful cinematic experience that speaks to the impact of modernization and industrialization on traditional ways of living. Seen through the lens of communities across the globe, the narrative is amplified by compositions from Philip Glass that feature native, classical, and electronic instruments. Enjoyed alone or as the second in The Qatsi Trilogy, you won’t want to miss this thought-provoking performance from The Philip Glass Ensemble and conductor Michael Riesman.

po.waq.qa.tsi (from the Hopi language, powaq sorcerer + qatsi life) n., an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life.

• Michael Riesman Conductor
• Members of Portland State University Chamber Choir Ethan Sperry, Conductor
• The Philip Glass Ensemble
• Oregon Symphony

This concert is part of the Special Concerts series, and is eligible for the Choose Your Own Series (Portland only). Concert length is approximately 1 hour 40 minutes. No intermission.

Concert begins promptly at the time listed.

James Spooner joins PAM CUT for a screening of his film Afro-Punk, followed by an author talk for his new book It Starts With Anger. Books will be available for sale on site.

It Starts With Anger is a coming-of-age graphic memoir exploring race, identity, and rebellion through James Spooner’s teenage years in 1990s New York into his young adulthood in the early 2000s. Confronted with systemic racism, microaggressions, and Nazi extremism within punk spaces, Spooner traces how reactionary anger evolved into a creative force and a path to self-determination, along the way following the founding of the Afro-Punk movement, his eventual decision to leave the company, and an ongoing raw examination of the tensions between underground culture and mainstream success.

While not a traditional graphic memoir, It Starts With Anger combines black-and-white, zine-inspired visual elements including photos, illustrations, and cartoon panels with traditional narrative in a unique package that recounts the story behind Afro-Punk. James Spooner has not talked publicly about his reasons for quitting Afro-Punk previously, and the book is a damning indictment of its corporatization. But more importantly, it also offers a look at issues of Black identity, representation, and the lack thereof in a movement that had often prided itself on allyship, while being completely myopic to all the ways it fell short in that regard as a scene that was ironically both liberating and alienating for the Black people drawn to it.

ON SCREEN: Afro-Punk

2003. Directed by James Spooner. Runtime: 1 hour 6 minutes.

This film, which many may assume is a historical punk documentary, is actually an honest and needed treatment of race and identity. Punk and Hardcore music are simply the microcosm in which it is told. First-time director, James Spooner, in telling this story, has opened new dialogues on these crucial subjects both intra- and interracially. Many times funny, sometimes sobering, a wake-up call to America. An examination of the duality of racial identity that DuBois called “double consciousness.” What could have been “The Bad Brains Story” is a story about kids, alienated by two cultures and two communities. Many of these punk and hardcore kids have never questioned their role in the punk scene or the black community until their interviews, and it’s obvious as they struggle on camera to reconcile a fragmented self.

This program is co-presented by Literary Arts as part of the Cover-to-Cover program.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (2026) Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer. 1hr 31min. Not Rated.

If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it. Best-selling poet and Pulitzer Prize-winner, lover of dogs and long walks in the woods, queer and out but intensely private—Oliver’s poems inspire liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers, naturalists and urbanites. She was America’s unlikely, contemporary mystic, stalking the ponds and forests of Cape Cod for nearly fifty years in order to open herself—and us, her readers—to the known and unknowable world. Sasha Waters’ beguiling portrait features poems read by Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi, Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Jesse Welles, and Oprah Winfrey.

This film is featured as part of Portland Book Festival’s Cover to Cover.

We do not generally provide advisories about subject matter or potentially triggering content in films, and films exhibited don’t necessarily reflect the views of PAM CUT or the Portland Art Museum. In addition to the synopses, trailers, and other links on our website, further information about content and age-appropriateness for specific films can be found on sites like Common Sense Media, IMDb, and DoesTheDogDie.com.

A documentary detailing the storied history of drug-addled teen punks-turned-icons.

Featuring interviews with Fat Mike, Eric Melvin, Aaron ‘El Hefe’ Abeyta, and Erik Sandin.

Doors open at 6:30 PM. Film at 7:00 PM.

• Director: James Buddy Day
• Year: 2026
• Country: United States
• Runtime: 120 minutes

WSU Vancouver MIS club and the Oregon Data Community host a free one-day training event for data professionals and students using the Microsoft Data Platform.

Session topics include SQL Server, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Azure Synapse, data analytics, visualization and more!

Coffee and Beverages will be provided, and lunch will be available for a small fee.

Conference attendance is free, but registration is required. Use the QR code below.

Black Arts PDX is a display of ephemera and an extended documentary trailer that foregrounds the history of the Black visual arts community in Northeast Portland. Curated by Dr. Kiara Hill, this rotating installation sheds light on the practices of key figures who were instrumental in shaping the perception of Black arts and culture in Portland. Whether utilitarian or decorative, these materials highlight ways Black artists sought to beautify the city and utilize their technical skills to address the needs of Black people. Black Arts PDX stems from a collaboration between Dr. Hill and Cultural Bearers Archive, Inc., on an archival project dedicated to preserving the unique lived experiences of Black artists and cultural workers in Portland.

CREATE SPACE is an interactive environment within the Black Art & Experiences (BAE) galleries that invites visitors to slow down, reflect, and respond. Designed as a rest area, reading room, art studio, and community gathering space, it supports connection, creativity, and dialogue. Through artist-led programs, hands-on activities, and quiet areas for reading or reflection, visitors can engage with the Black Art and Experiences gallery in a personal, generative way. This first year, CREATE SPACE is activated alongside Conductions: Black Imaginings II, which centers Black performance art and its archives. Both spaces emphasize process — research, writing, improvisation, and experimentation — as essential to the creative journey.

Thirty-four days before she’s sent to prison, notorious Silicon Valley founder Elizabeth Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to document her every move. What begins as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. From boundary-pushing directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim comes You Can See Everything.

NODES 2026 is Neo4j's free, 24-hour global online conference, running across every time zone on November 12. The program is aimed at developers, data professionals, architects and AI engineers, with sessions on modern application development, multi-agent workflows, graph-backed retrieval and building context-rich systems that hold up in production. Talks are grouped by experience level, so there are introductory sessions for people new to graph databases alongside deeper technical material on knowledge graphs, agent orchestration and graph analytics at scale. Because the event streams continuously for a full day, Pacific-time attendees can join sessions in the morning, over lunch or in the evening, and recordings are typically published afterward. Registration is free through the Neo4j eve https://neo4j.com/event/nodes-2026-engineering-better-intelligence/