Brought from bohemia to a video store near you last year, care of the autobiographical feature film Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs is the patriarch of a vanishing breed of driven nonconformists who have enlivened the postwar arts with studied outrage. In William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers, an adoring tribute directed by German documentary filmmaker Klaus Maeck, we see Burroughs, scion of a manufacturing fortune, in several media guises: novelist, filmmaker, social commentator, artist, and would-be politician, who confesses to once toying with the idea of running for commissioner of sewers in his native St. Louis. He may dance dangerously close to self-parody on occasion, but Burroughs' self is unlike any other. A-
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