Fashion: Zubaz Pants
Imagine, if you will, the perfect piece of apparel for the lower half of the human body. It would be elastic of waist, given our collective tendency to pack on the pounds. As for the thighs, they’d be generously cut — due to possible weight gain, yes, but also because it’s just more comfortable that way. The ankles? Tapered, natch, to prevent inefficient friction between the wearer and his environment (and between the pant legs themselves). The fabric, meanwhile, would be lightweight, airy, breathable. Because it gets hot in there, damn it.

On to the aesthetics. The animal kingdom’s most splendid denizens see no reason to be modest. So why should we? Screw muted tone and textures — give us multiple colors, patterns that bewitch and bewilder the eye.

Are you concentrating? Then you know the end result is more than a mere pair of jeans or corduroys. It’s something, instead, that delivers an emphatic message: “Here I am, world — and here are my pants!”

Lo, it is a pair of Zubaz: conceived in the late ’80s, proudly worn by Arena Football players and the young men who emulated them, and then — quickly, unjustly — consigned to history’s ash pile. If you chance upon a pair, in a thrift store or your parent’s basement, snatch them up and wear them — not timidly, not ironically, but joyously. Your legs and groin will thank you.

— Adam Reilly

Entertainer: Ashlee Simpson
When Ashlee Simpson’s lip-synching game was exposed on an episode of Saturday Night Live on October 23, 2004, she responded, at first, by blaming the whole thing on her drummer. There were subsequent excuses about her acid-reflux, and the fact that she was planning to sing but needed a cued-up backing track to help make her tired vocals sound richer — nobody believed that! Especially a few short months later when Ashlee sang in front of a live audience again during the Orange Bowl. She sounded ghastly. Absolutely horrible.

But my adoration of this scorned member of the pop-tart entourage is pinned to the perfect shit storm of her flaws. For the same reason subscribers to US Weekly and People defend and pray for the renaissance of the Spears family — loving them for their messes and mistakes — I feel the same inexplicable devotion to Ashlee. She’s a girl who isn’t all that gifted or all that groomed, yet still has managed to persevere through one of the biggest scandals in music or pop-culture history.

Her buxom older sister, Jessica, marketed her virginity and planned a dream wedding for an early marriage that went to hell in a hand basket. And what did Ashlee do? Talked about her sexual exploits in interviews, lied about never getting plastic surgery, and celebrated her 23rd birthday with an ’80s prom party, during which she was, of course, required to wear outdated fashions. Ashlee’s egregious personal and professional errors have earned her lusty boos from an angry nation of music lovers and fame junkies, but through her sheer will not to be brought down by the celebrity machine she abused for her own desires, she has succeeded in winning my heart.

— Sharon Steel

Film: Ishtar
Critics moving in on the carcass of a budget-busting, misbegotten movie are not a pretty sight. Elaine May’s Ishtar, starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as surreally untalented singer-songwriters caught up in espionage and revolution in Morocco, was a goner long before it opened, what with its production woes, its difficult writer-director (who hasn’t made a film since), its escalating $55 million budget, and its two overpaid stars. Roger Ebert was among the kindest when he wrote, “a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy.”

I didn’t see it that way. In 1987 I was a second-string critic for the Chicago Reader, reviewing films like East German documentaries about black-lung disease. I rarely got to see mainstream fare. The year before, I was almost escorted from the theater for laughing nonstop and mirthlessly at The Three Amigos. I didn’t respond quite as pathologically to Ishtar (a remarkably similar movie in theme, spirit, and dumb songs), though Hoffman trying to teach Beatty how to say “schmuck” still cracks me up inordinately. But back then, if you showed me a blind camel, Charles Grodin as a CIA agent, and Isabelle Adjani’s nipple, then threw in a song titled “Wardrobe of Love,” I was about as happy as a man could be.

Watching it again 20 years later, I find it at least as funny as Walk Hard. And it also actually has a satirical edge, being sharper on the Middle East realpolitik of the day than, say, Charlie Wilson’s War. Beatty and Hoffman might have acted like idiots lost in the fictitious country of Ishtar in May’s movie, but they look like geniuses compared with those who gave us the reality of Iraq.

— Peter Keough