Rectangular, professorial glasses in that solemn shade of reddish-brown; olive-green knit scarf; long gray coat with suede elbow patches.
Is that a silver Mickey Mouse ring on his right hand? On his left, is that matching gold version his wedding band?
He speaks of art, literature, cinema and religion in deep, quiet tones. Best lean in, or half of what he says will be lost to the surrounding bustle.
Did he just say he and his brother formed the All Citizen Disneyland Preservation Brigade, a passive crusade to maintain the laws, ideals and history of America's first theme park?
That he did, and for the artist known as S.C. Jones, there are few things held more dear than Walt Disney's beloved theme park. There's his family, for one, and local history, his dedication to teaching and, increasingly, his own art. That's about it. Jones is not (yet) regarded as one of the city's creative elite. At times he was too exhausted or wanted to spend time with the kids or preferred curling his fingers around a martini glass instead of a paintbrush. But as Walt Disney put it, "If you can dream it, you can do it. Always remember that this whole thing was started with a dream and a mouse." Now Jones is taking his art seriously.
*****
There he was, on Page 4 of the August 4, 2006 Entertainment Weekly. Beneath letters from readers defending Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, M. Night Shyamalan, Thom Yorke and The Wiggles, Jones stood in a black ball cap and Mickey Mouse tee next to a white life preserver bearing the words "Mark Twain" and "Disneyland." The caption: "OBSESSIVE FAN OF THE WEEK!"
"It was getting annoying seeing these articles and reviews that said, ‘Even though it's based on a Disney ride ...'" Jones explains. "It seemed like a really easy out, an easy way of mocking it. In defense of all the artists who work on those rides, it was just sort of frustrating. And then finally I got my Entertainment Weekly with the Pirates of the Caribbean on the cover, and her review was basically, ‘Even though it's based on the Disney ride, where you get strapped in and spun around ...' and I was like, ‘Oh, this is it.'"
He grabbed a thesaurus, wrote five angry pages and went to bed. The next morning, his wife, Becky, encouraged him to send it. He cleaned it up, removed some of the harshest criticisms and made his point clear: Disneyland is made up not of rides, but of themed attractions, which should be viewed as a critic would consider a work of art.
A couple of weeks later he received an e-mail from the magazine, followed by a phone call. "I was substituting over the summer, these second-graders are all screaming in the background, the phone rings and it's Entertainment Weekly: ‘Can I have a picture of you with all your Pirates stuff?'"
Jones doesn't really have "Pirates stuff." He's got a few Johnny-Depp-as-Captain-Jack-Sparrow pieces, but they're memorabilia from the films, which, as he hates critics to mock, were based on a "themed attraction." That specific attraction is a Disneyland original. And when it comes to Disneyland, he's amassed a lot of stuff.
His divided living room, crammed floor-to-ceiling on one side with DVDs, books, family photographs and original artwork, boasts designated sections for Disney books and films. The other side houses the bulk of his Disneyland collection. Vintage prints and photos, framed tickets, aging park map, character pins, Mickey Mouse lamp on Mickey Mouse table, Jack Skellington martini glasses. The CD rack contains Disney-related discs only, including rare original soundtracks of ... themed attractions. Where living room meets dining room, an entire cabinet of gifts from Mom: row upon row of Disney toys, Pez dispensers and other memorabilia. Where dining room meets kitchen, a crammed shelf of items the family itself purchased at the park: cups, figurine, postcards, vintage Enchanted Tiki Room puzzle and original Uncle Remus album a friend discovered buried in a garage.
"Our house is just full of crap. But it's organized crap," Jones laughs. "We've had to stop buying Disneyland stuff unless we just can't live without it. Number one, we can't afford it. And number two, we've run out of room."
While Jones was growing up, his family visited Disneyland once a year or so, though Jones never thought much of it. Not until he attended UNLV. Assigned a paper in critic/curator Libby Lumpkin's psychoanalysis in art class, Jones was stumped. His friends chose pieces by Van Gogh, Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali, but as a joke, he turned in a one-page proposal on Disneyland, specifically discussing the Matterhorn as phallic symbol and why going through the tunnels symbolized a return to the vagina. Lumpkin loved the idea.
Jones found the majority of Disneyland literature focused on fluff: "It's the happiest place on Earth! La la la la la!'" He turned to Walt Disney biographies, from which he discovered not only a shared passion for art but family roots that similarly traced back to Kansas City, Missouri.
"Then I actually started finding serious articles in architectural magazines about Disneyland and art," Jones remembers. "Basically [Walt Disney] took construction guys, and he took filmmakers, and he stuck them in a room together and said, ‘Get along.' They would argue—like the castle; the filmmakers wanted to do forced perspective, and the construction guys couldn't figure out why they wanted it to shrink as it's going up. ...
"As I was researching this stuff, I went to the park, and the more I went, the more fascinated I became."
"I'm more an operational fan of how the park will traffic 60,000 to 70,000 people a day," says his brother Ben, the vice president of operations for Travelocity on Location. "He's become more of an independent historian. He's very easy to buy Christmas presents for."
*****
A dozen years later, the extended Jones clan held its 2006 reunion at Disneyland. One morning Sean was headed from the hotel to the park when he spied a newsstand.
"There's the Entertainment Weekly with Samuel L. Jackson on the cover," he recalls. "So I pull it out and I flip through, and there it was."
"Self-described ‘art educator' S.C. Jones of North Las Vegas, Nev., takes his knowledge of Disneyland seriously. Pirates of the Caribbean is not an ‘amusement ride,' he complains, but a ‘themed attraction,' which he sees as an art form comparable to cinema. He suggests that our unwillingness to perceive such a distinction is ‘a clever but patronizing mockery ... fashionable among elitists.' Us ... elitists?"
"And that's the ironic thing, that I guess they hit the nail on the head. I'm on my way to Disneyland, and I come to find out they say I'm the obsessive Disneyland Fan of the Week.
"Yeah, I'd say so."
*****
Jones' paternal grandfather, Leslie Clover Jones, was a Kansas City gambler who relocated to the area in 1947 to open the Railroad Pass Casino. The Landmark followed (the flying saucer on top was his idea). His other grandfather, musician Ben Hoffman, led a '30s big band in Wisconsin that included a piano player named Liberace. Hoffman ultimately let him go for being too showy, Jones says. "But he said it was the best thing my grandfather could have done for him. We'd go out shopping and bump into Liberace wearing a T-shirt and shorts, and Liberace would say hi to him, which I thought was really weird."
Jones was born March 6, 1967. He shares a birthday with Michelangelo.
Jones spent his childhood at Grandpa Hoffman's ranch house, the current location of McCarran International Airport's parking garage. Hoffman was instrumental in birthing the lounge-act era of Vegas, and as Jones writes on the his website, www.artofscjones.com, he grew up "watching folks with mixed drinks and smokes stay up all hours singing the standards of the greatest generation ... We watched our town grow from hospitable gangsters to hostile corporate monsters. ... A sense of history was lost as familiar sites were blown to bits, and my heritage was lost to incoming ‘locals' who declared citizenship after two years."
While attending Valley High School, Jones participated in two-week summer music-camp sessions at Mount Charleston, where he met fellow Vegas native Becky Baker. Jones was 16, his future wife 15. This year marks the 21st they've been together. (They learned later that her father had run numbers for Jones' uncle Haskell, whose family started the Jones Brothers Chips Company back in Kansas City.)
After working in a bookstore for several years, Jones joined the Clark Country School District. Nowadays he teaches art, commercial design and film studies at Canyon Springs. His room is crammed with art supplies, empty Jones Soda bottles, First Friday fliers, Tupac posters, Van Gogh and Da Vinci action figures, photos of Jones and his wife, photos of Jones and actor Bruce Campbell, photos of Jones on the Letters page of Entertainment Weekly, and notes from students reading, "Mr. Jones! Happy Labor Day!" and "Mr. Jones is the coolest!"
The secret to teaching, Jones says, is easy. "You've gotta have a sense of humor."
A decade ago, in the violent throes of a midlife crisis, he helped form the comedy-punk band Tippy Elvis, a B-52's-inspired collective that invited over-the-top crowd participation and included Jones on keyboard "and whatever else he could find" and Ginger Bruner, currently of Killian's Angels, on tuba.
"He had lots of talent," Bruner says. "He played some fun keyboards, to say the least. Nobody could play the piano from their knees with their hands above their heads like Sean. Normally the piano guy is just a guy, but he worked the piano." Jones began illustrating the lyrics to Tippy tunes, and his Raw Soup Comics Volume 1 featured bug-eyed grotesques enacting such audience favorites as "Surf Poet," "Cigarette" and "Bad Mayonnaise."
Now, stretched back in a leather chair in his living room, martini in hand, Jones laughs as old Tippy Elvis videos herky-jerk across his television. In a highlight moment from a particularly avant-garde Summerlin Library show, Jones, in black Converse and leather jacket, and with considerably more hair, puffs his way through "Cigarette," a ditty undercutting the glamorousness of smoking. His keyboard rests atop an ironing board, which rocks back and forth. He drops to the floor yet continues playing.
"Tippy Elvis' problem is we came along about 10 years too early," Bruner muses. "Of course, Sean's graphic stuff gave us something that nobody else had as a band. Nobody else had a person creating exceedingly cool cartoons and artwork for crowds.
"He's able to make good stuff that has tons of humor in it. I personally don't think there's enough humor happening in art. People are typically way too serious. His art ability really is fabulous."
*****
That's his John Coltrane, in green, on the wall behind the baby grand at Green Valley's Osaka Japanese Bistro. The blue Sarah Vaughn's his, too, and the maroon-hued Clifford Brown. The rear grill area fills daily under the watchful eyes of his Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker.
Jones scored the mural gig from Osaka owner Gene Nakanishi, a former trumpet player and band director at Chaparral High School. "I had to talk him into Duke Ellington," Jones says. "And I want to come back and do Billie Holiday, even if I don't get paid for it."
To get his muralist's creative juices flowing, Nakanishi played the musicians' standards as Jones worked. Nakanishi also encouraged his staff to keep the juices flowing in other ways.
"I was working on Coltrane, and I had asked for a beer," Jones recalls. "I was drinking it pretty steadily, but unbeknownst to me, every time I would turn around, the waitress would come by and fill it up again. This went on and on, and it finally got to be about 8 o'clock at night. I got up to go to the bathroom, and it was like, ‘Whoooa!' I had to call my wife: ‘I'm gonna be here for awhile.'" His finger traces a path down Coltrane. "You can see here where I got very expressive with the drips."
Teaching and raising a family left Jones little time to pursue his own art. He never took painting very seriously, anyway, instead messing around with comics and accepting the rare mural assignment (he's painted them at several local schools) or request to design backdrops for the Las Vegas, Laughlin and Atlantic City Comedy Stop clubs. But over Halloween weekend in 2000, Jones began a portrait of Psycho's Anthony Perkins. "Forgoing my usual habit of overworking detail, I emulated the expressive style found in portraits hanging in horror films such as Corman's Poe films," he wrote on his web page. "Pleased with the result and the freedom this new style gave me, I began selecting horror film icons that have special meaning to only myself (and perhaps a few other demented folk)."
Characters from The Shining, The Exorcist, Halloween, Creature from the Black Lagoon and others followed, and within a year, Jones had amassed more than 30 works. "I intended on displaying the works in October of 2001," he wrote. "Then, the true horror of September 11 hit our society, and I found myself hesitant to celebrate the trivial horrors associated with my paintings." A few found their way into a 2004 Halloween show at Pussykat Tattoo Parlor, but it wasn't until last October that the Box Office gallery displayed the full Face of Horror collection as part of First Friday's fourth-anniversary celebration.
"He has a pretty naturalistic, relaxed, rather straightforward, really honest style," says Charles Morgan, an artist and art instructor who went to school with Jones and whose wife, artist Suzanne Hackett-Morgan, purchased "Phantom of the Paradise." "There are a lot of subtleties in his work and in him." (His Downtown experiences haven't always been as rewarding. He was chosen as one of the Centennial muralists, but when it came time for Jones to commit his vision of singer Louis Prima, the committee "couldn't find a wall.")
Recently, he's experimented with a sci-fi series exploring principles of art (color, form, line, etc.) through renditions of Star Trek, Star Wars and Logan's Run characters. Though he's shooting for a gallery showing —"I want the hardwood floors and the wine and the cheese buffet!"—he's not waiting around for it. "They'll probably just be something else I'll end up sticking in my garage."
*****
The Jones family visits Disneyland several times a year, funded in part by a spare-change bucket to which friends and extended family sometimes contribute. They stay several days each time. And yet they're not the craziest Disney people out there. Says Jones, "There are people even freakier than me who go there every day!"
At the park, Jones knows where to eat, where the bathrooms are and where smoking is allowed. He knows if he buys a cup of coffee and keeps the receipt, he receives free refills all day. Jones has been "backstage"; he's privy to insider secrets about the ongoing Disneyland/Disney World feud; he knows about the basketball hoop inside the Matterhorn; and how certain "imagineers" included nuns in all of the original concept paintings and planted "hidden" Mickey Mouse images in the rides.
"I always told my wife that that's my retirement goal, to be an old man working in the park," Jones daydreams. "Henry Kissinger used to do that. They'd give him a little suit and let him sell popcorn. People would tell him, ‘Dude, you look just like Henry Kissinger!'"
Sure, the "Disney Resorts" have taken on unfavorable characteristics akin to the global McDonald's franchise. The derogatory implication of "Disneyfication" has been applied to his own hometown. But for Jones, true Disney magic emanates from the artistic ideals that fueled the park's creation: "They were thinking of these films, so they'd have the mood music in the background, mood lighting. They'd come up with a story for each ride you're going through, and they would treat it like a film. They're maneuvered like a camera, directing your point of view towards what they want you to see."
Walt Disney considered animation an art, even going so far as to hire Salvador Dali for the short film Destino. Time art critic Robert Hughes even credited Disney, Neal Gabler writes in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, "with inventing pop art itself, not only in the look but in the convergence of high and low art he affected." It would seem Jones shares more than just Kansas City roots with Disney—his Face of Horror pieces and sci-fi figures spring directly from popular culture. His teaching style draws similar parallels. "He would just find people and encourage them," Jones says of Disney. "Little kids would come up to him, ‘Do you draw Mickey Mouse?' ‘No.' ‘Well what do you do?' And he said, ‘Well, I'm like a bee. I go around and kind of stimulate everybody to do their best work.'"
As Jones prepares to see his vision of Louis Prima realized at long last, on the wall of a tea shop opening Downtown, his artistic vision seems to be coming together, as well. "I've had a hard time finding my own style, but I don't want to fake it. It will come upon me one day. I'll figure it all out."