'sad eyes like sharpened daggers, you'll never walk only stagger...'

I am a sucker for pathos, it is true. Especially, probably not surprisingly, when it comes to adolescents and drugs and death.

I've been watching Skins, a rather shockingly graphic British television series about a bunch of fucked up to varying degrees teenagers. 90210 gone bad, if you will.

The acting is good, the music is decent, and the stories are dirty and mean and sweet.

Sid, one of our angsty young heroes, wakes up one morning to find his father dead in his easy chair, presumably from a stroke or some other abruptly instantaneous demise. (The father, a gentle and worn down soul, still has one hand curled around a glass of whiskey; the other dangles a cigarette burned down to the nub.)

Sid, in shock, goes to school and spends the day staring into the void, not telling anyone about the nightmare that is waiting for him back home. Later that night his best friend Tony drags him out to a club to see Crystal Castles, and this is what happens there. Pathos enough to make you cry. (And buy a Crystal Castles song, at least if you are like me, and a sucker for such things.)