Word: rocker
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...first waves began arriving on Saturday, black-jacketed Rockers by the hundreds, parka-clad Mods by the thousands. By Sunday morning, Hastings swarmed with teen-age Beatles and their birds, scruffy and wild-haired after all-night nesting on the beach. To add to the general misery, a light rain was falling. Suddenly, the kids began ranging through town in packs, stopping traffic, banging on cars, chanting ("Up the Mods"), looking for trouble. They raided cafes for dishes and glasses to throw, knives and forks to brandish, chased each other up the beaches and down the streets under a hail...
More patient sociologists who have studied them say that few members of both groups are actually "yobs" (hoods), but that they all are too easily incited by hooligans and by the opportunity to show off. Mod-Rocker antagonism is honed by class resentment, for the Rockers are mostly manual workers while Mods tend to be selfconsciously superior white-collar types. Many Britons see in these outbursts a symptom of deep boredom and frustration that, in different ways, is also shared by the older generation. While the youngsters enjoy unparalleled affluence, they nevertheless see drab lives ahead. As the Guardian diagnosed...
...Rockers have no desire to be accepted. At truck stops outside London, they sit by the hour rolling cigarettes and jabbering intently about motorcycles. Only when a covey of new cyclists roars into the parking lot do they look up to see "who's got a new bike." Though they all look like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, they worry about their reputation as troublemakers, claim gravely: "That film did us a lot of harm." The Rockers do not conceal their disdain for the Mods. "The money we spend tripping around and going places, they spend on clothes...
Most highly prized by the tastemakers is the Thonet rocker. A cross between a badminton racquet and a Flexible Flyer, this calligraphic doyen of gracious sitting shows off to great advantage against the stark whiteness of painted bricks or modish raw plaster walls. Pablo Picasso owns one, and so does Hollywood Director Billy Wilder. Original Thonet rockers sell nowadays for between $75 and $185 (depending on state of repair and elegance of design) in Manhattan antiqueries, sold for much more until imports of them from Europe began to flood the U.S. market two years...
Thonet Industries Inc. of Manhattan, heir to the century-old trademark, is now a bustling commercial furniture maker whose no-nonsense designs bear little kinship to bentwood. Somewhat surprised by all the excitement over vintage Thonet today, the firm nonetheless still "makes available" a modern version of the classic rocker, continues to manufacture the Vienna Chair (the familiar restaurant "upright") as well as the bentwood armchair that brought fame to the Thonet name and once moved Architect Le Corbusier to observe: "We believe that this chair, whose millions of representatives are used on the Continent and the two Americas, possesses...