"Steve Buscemi is celery. Or rather, he represents the vegetable's interests. A pantheon of ad men responsible for the cultural perceptions of vegetables has gathered in a dramatically lit conference room: heirloom tomatoes ("didn't even exist five years ago"), kale ("consumption is at an all-time high"), brussels sprouts ("don't know how you did it, Bill"). Celery's numbers are down. Though it is Buscemi's job, changing how the public feels about celery seems ridiculous to him."
"Elsewhere, Steve Buscemi is the letter Q, forever out of place in the alphabet. Why, he laments, must he always be grouped with the normies, when he clearly belongs at the back of the alphabet with the other esoteric letters, X, Y, and Z? Q is a provocative noise musician, with a sloppy blue mohawk and matching soul patch. But he has celery's fatalism."
Steve Buscemi portrays personified, marginalized figures—a depressed celery and the misfit letter Q—to explore how cultural trends and public perception shift. Celery appears at a marketing meeting where ad men lament its declining popularity while celebrating trendier vegetables, and Buscemi's character finds the task of rebranding absurd. As Q, Buscemi embodies a noisy, outsider artist who resents being lumped with mainstream letters and accepts a melancholic inevitability. Both portrayals use surreal, absurdist settings to compress moral and emotional truths, balancing sympathy for niche identities with a critique of their nostalgia and detachment from broader cultural realities.
Read at Portland Monthly
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