Twenty one year old Don Sanderson of Ontario’s Whitby Dunlops died this January. He got into a brawl on December 12th and after spending a month in hospital, succumbed to his head injuries this past January, becoming a parents’ past, becoming a memory because violence on the rink is condoned and encouraged.

Since hockey started in 1875, fighting has always been a part of the package. Before the turn of the century nearly a dozen people died on the rink, most of those responsible being acquitted. As the 1900′s began, regulations slowly began to form and while several more deaths occurred, most notably in the thirties, a ban was never issued, a suggestion to withhold (cough*grow up*cough) was never handed down to the players. New rules did come to fruition however and today the fighting that occurs, while real, is almost always the result of forethought and planning, an illusory pageantry that, in junior leagues and the NHL alike, is considered a worthwhile way of keeping fans coming back for more. Evidently the game isn’t good enough to draw fans on its own.

There is a code in today’s modern hockey. A code of silence. What happens on the rink stays on the rink. Those who push the boundaries too far (Bertuzzi, Moore, etc.) get handled with enough disciplinary action to make the so-called ‘liberal urban sissies’ happy but not enough to actually make a point.

The preferred policy is to allow the status to stay quo; Let the boys play their game, on-rink fighting diminishes instances of slashing and high-sticking, and so on, etc..

And so when a 21 year-old fell to the ice and slipped into a coma, the silence continued. It happens. Nobody ever gets REALLY hurt. He’ll wake up. But he didn’t. He never would. Sanderson’s death marks the first death deemed directly related to a hockey fight by a coroner since the current set of on-ice violence regulations have been in play. His passing should have stood as an example but hockey is an establishment of tradition.

“Unless you’ve played the game, you can’t understand.”

Perhaps. But perhaps there’s also a reason for why Tiger Woods never takes his three iron to Mike Weir, for why Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham don’t throw their cleats around to settle things… to say nothing of true football fans…. Kobe Bryant keeps cool on the courts and Peyton Manning holds his composure across the yard lines. Baseball players don’t take the bat to one another. Nobody’s ever tried to strangle an opposing team member with a volleyball net, curlers don’t make use of what their stones could really dish out, and England’s boy princes have never jousted with their mallets in quarrel on the polo pitch.

Violence in hockey is nothing more than an ignorant attempt to amp up a sport that is already exciting enough as it is. One need look no further for proof than across the pond where nearly all European hockey leagues have banned fighting or to the Olympics where fighting is strictly banned as it is in all olympic wages of sport. The sport is the draw. The sport itself is the hook. All other sports line and sink their fans simply by existing in their raw form, without the draw of what has become pre-meditated yet spontaneous chicanery on ice by players who are picked specifically to get into said scuffs in the first place. The bottom line is that hockey is a game. A game. At its heart it was designed for recreation, and while money, glory, competition, and a trophy are at stake, in the end it’s still JUST a game.

Look at the picture at the top before you click away (see it larger HERE). It was taken during a Vancouver Giants game recently. Look in the audience. There are actually people smiling, exuding content over grown men, the professionals among them being paid millions of dollars, engaging in violence for entertainment. But at what point does entertainment become reality?

I’m sure a mother and a father in Whitby would be more than happy to provide an answer.

I watch a lot of television, a lot of movies. One of the perks of being more or less self-employed is that I have a lot of spare time on my hands. With that spare time, I tend to immerse myself in the ridiculously vast and equally narrow pop-culture world that surrounds us. I spend more time in front of a TV or with a book in my hands than is likely humanly healthy. Billy Bob Thornton once said, “There’s a lot of losers out there,” and upsettingly, most of them are writing, directing, or acting in the most mind-numbingly irrelevant drivel you can imagine. On that rare occasion though, often when we least suspect it, some form of art will drag us into its world, immerse us in its culture and prosecute our emotions. If we’re luckier still, we’ll finish thrown out, relinquished and charged with a count of awakening.

Skins is one of those shows. It pulls you in like a vacuum, continuously siphoning your emotions throughout, toying with them and at times leaving you unable to even cope. It accomplishes this with a grace and quirkiness that is unrivaled by most anything on television in North America.

Part of its appeal is its cast of complete unknowns. You’ll recognize Dev Patel from this year’s Slumdog Millionaire and after some fumbling of mind you might realize that Nicholas Hoult was in About A Boy with Hugh Grant as well as The Weather Manwith Nicolas Cage, but unless you’re a Brit you’ll likely have no idea who any of the others are and this is a GOOD thing.

I’ve always preferred watching something with newcomers because you’re able to lose yourself in the illusion. They’re not actors playing characters. They’re just characters… and thusly they become real people in your mind. You don’t find yourself thinking about how a shot was done or how the actor did something on set. You buy into the mirage and the work becomes all the more sincere.

The Skins’ Music Supervisor, Alex Hancock, is a master soundtracker. His selections are spot on for every scene. Some of his choices are so perfect that they literally transform an ordinary scene into something spectacular. From Buddy Holly to The Decemberists, Lambchop to Britney Spears, Portishead to MGMT, Asobi Seksu to the Warsaw Village Band… his choices are both eclectic and a sobering reminder of just how crucial music is to a good piece of film. This show’s tunes are so good that I’ve spent almost an entire day in time added up downloading hundreds of songs.

The icing on the Skins cake however is probably the writing. A good writer can lift a decent show or film to masterpiece levels. Bryan Elsley is that kind of writer. Brutally honest, poignant, startling at times, his script is both comedic and heavy. Good lines aren’t enough though and Elsley is clearly aware of this. Plot is just as important as intelligent banter. The story line of Skins’ first two seasons is almost epic in nature. Sweeping and raw, the story takes its characters through enough ups and downs to make a roller coaster seem tame. Intricate and powerful, his words transfer to film in a way I’ve never seen before. His use of seemingly infinite settings, daring to not confine his characters to the same five sets like most shows do, widens the breadth of Skins’ visual appeal. Moreover, his willingness to create abstract scenes that don’t make sense on first grasp but crystalize in clarity upon further reflection is both admirable and enchanting.

There is a scene in Episode 3 of Season 2 where Sid needs his best friend Tony to comfort him. A simple setting could well have worked, but Elsley decided to put them in a crowded club and with Hancock’s choosing of Crystal Castles electronic music overriding all other sound, what could have been a plain scene became a powerful and dramatic affair that laid tremendous emphasis on the emotion of the moment.

I was moved by the veracity of this show’s characters, their complex and messy relationships, their gains and losses, how you can’t help but fall in love with them, even the ones you hate. There is an over the top quality to how their story unfolds and yet, the realism of it all is almost impossibly ardent. It’s been a while since I connected with fictional characters like I did with those in Skins; an even longer time since a work of film brought tears to my eyes. There is truly something magical about this show.

For the third season, the entire main cast was dropped in favour of a new ensemble, a pattern that will repeat itself every two seasons according to the studio. I can’t say that I’m a fan of this, but in a way, it’s nice to have two beautifully moving seasons wrapped up as a package, all strings tied up, instead of a drawn out saga that could lose its touch. The story as is won’t be watered down, won’t lose its raw edge, and won’t drag on. It will remain a small and worthy piece of work that can be admired for its tightly woven 19 episodes.

The best line of the whole show was Chris’, “Fuck it.” Not a ‘give up and quit’kind of “fuck it”, but an ‘I’ll give it a go/what have I got to lose’ kind of “fuck it” – an ‘always say yes/take a chance/accept a dare/prove yourself wrong/tackle it head on/push yourself/you can do it’ kind of “fuck it”. If you listen for it, you’ll hear him and the others say it all the time. And if I can say so myself, it’s fucking brilliant- a smashing good message…

… and one that this show lives up to. It’s daring, risqué and forward in a way that more shows should take notice of. Pushing the envelope in film isn’t about shock and awe, it’s about presenting an alternate reality that is so SHOCKINGLY close to the real world that it can’t help but leave you in AWE. If you haven’t seen Skins yet, you’re missing out.

The Rosebuds are an indie rock/dance/folk band from Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Its current members are Ivan Howard (vocals/guitar/ drums/ bass/keyboards/programming) and Kelly Crisp (vocals/keyboard/drums/guitar/accordion). Billy Alphin had played drums on the album The Rosebuds Make Out, Wes Phillips played drums on the E.P.”Unwind“, Lee Waters played drums on the record Birds Make Good Neighbors, and Matt McCaughan played the drums on both “Night of the Furies‘ and “Life Like“.

Howard and Crisp met while in college in Wilmington, North Carolina. That fall, they moved to nearby Raleigh and joined with drummer Billy Alphin of Schooner to form The Rosebuds. Merge Records discovered their demo in early 2003 and released The Rosebuds Make Out as a full-length debut album that October.

Following that recording, Alphin left the group and was replaced by Jonathan Bass for their 2003 touring schedule. The Rosebuds Unwind, an EP with six songs, was released in April 2005, followed by Birds Make Good Neighbors in September. The Rosebuds are now joined by Logan Matheny and Matt McCaughan on drums for shows and tours. Their third album, Night of the Furies, was released in April of 2007. A fourth full-length, Life Like, was released in Oct. 2008.